A Lightweight Authenticated Encryption Algorithm for RFID Systems

Security of RFID systems is a very important issue with the increasing of their applications. To achieve secure communications between a reader and a tag in RFID systems, encryption of the communication data is usually performed. However, in case of low-cost RFID tags, it is difficult for them to adopt the well-known encryption algorithms because the tags have very limited resources to implement the encryption algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight authenticated symmetric key encryption algorithm for RFID systems which use low-cost tags. To achieve a secure message authentication in the proposed algorithm, redundant bits are contained in a ciphertext. Even though the proposed algorithm uses very lightweight operations for the encryption/decryption, it provides confidentiality, authentication, and integrity.