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Security Enhancements of a Mutual Authentication Protocol Used in a HF Full-Fledged RFID Tag

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Abstract

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is used in many applications such as access control, transport, ticketing and contactless payment. The full-fledged High Frequency (HF) tags are the most popular RFID tags for these applications that require relatively high cost security operations. However, these HF tags are threatened by many passive attacks such as eavesdropping, desynchronization and ElectroMagnetic (EM) Side Channel Attacks (SCA). In this article, we propose the implementation and the validation of a full-fledged HF tag architecture using an enhanced mutual authentication protocol. This is achieved using a FPGA platform. Security analysis against Electromagnetic Attack (EMA) and desynchronization attacks on the original protocol are presented. Then enhancements at the protocol level are proposed to overcome these attacks. The implementation of these security enhancements shows a low overhead (+22 LUTs) compared to previous existing security hardware solutions (+598 LUTs).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sousse, ENISO, T-4023, Sousse Erriadh, Tunisia

    Yassine Naija

  2. University of Grenoble Alpes, LCIS, F-26000, Valence, France

    Yassine Naija & Vincent Beroulle

  3. University of Monastir, EμE, T-5019, Monastir, Tunisia

    Yassine Naija & Mohsen Machhout

Authors
  1. Yassine Naija
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  2. Vincent Beroulle
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  3. Mohsen Machhout
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Correspondence to Yassine Naija.

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Responsible Editor: M. Barragan and K. Huang

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Naija, Y., Beroulle, V. & Machhout, M. Security Enhancements of a Mutual Authentication Protocol Used in a HF Full-Fledged RFID Tag. J Electron Test 34, 291–304 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-018-5725-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-018-5725-x

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