SCARS: Simplified cryptographic algorithm for RFID systems

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology made popular by the ability of RFID tags to uniquely represent objects. However, they are severely resource-constrained due to design restrictions. This limits their ability to perform complex computations for security. In RFID systems, the priority is to ensure the integrity of messages and entity authentication. We consider message integrity in our work. To ensure message integrity (i.e., the sent message must be the same as the received message), the actual message is usually hashed and transmitted to the receiver along with the encrypted message. However, it is a challenge for resource-constrained devices such as RFID systems to encrypt a message using different algorithms (such as encryption and hashing algorithm). In this paper, we propose a new symmetric key encryption approach that includes integrity as part of the encryption process for RFID systems. With this approach, we do not need to employ hash functions to achieve message integrity, thus leading to computational efficiency.