Low Cost Countermeasure at Authentication Protocol Level against Electromagnetic Side Channel Attacks on RFID Tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is widely spread in many security applications. Producing secured low-cost and low-power RFID tags is a challenge. The used of lightweight encryption algorithms can be an economic solution for these RFID security applications. This article proposes low cost countermeasure to secure RFID tags against Electromagnetic Side Channel Attacks (EMA). Firstly, we proposed a parallel architecture of PRESENT block cipher that represents a one way of hiding countermeasures against EMA. 200 000 Electromagnetic traces are used to attack the proposed architecture, whereas 10 000 EM traces are used to attack an existing serial architecture of PRESENT. Then we proposed a countermeasure at mutual authentication protocol by limiting progressively the number of EM traces. This limitation prevents the attacker to perform the EMA. The proposed countermeasure is based on time delay function. It requires 960 GEs and represents a low cost solution compared to existing countermeasures at primitive block cipher (2471 GEs). Keywords—Radio Frequency Identification (RFID); electromagnetic side channel attack; PRESENT; mutual authentication protocol; countermeasures