Pandaka: A lightweight cipher for RFID systems

The ubiquitous use of RFID tags raises concern about potential security risks in RFID systems. Because low-cost tags are extremely resource-constrained devices, common security mechanisms adopted in resource-rich equipment such as computers are no longer applicable to them. Hence, one challenging research topic is to design a lightweight cipher that is suitable for low-cost RFID tags. Traditional cryptography generally assumes that the two communicating parties are equipotent entities. In contrast, there is a large capability gap between readers and tags in RFID systems. We observe that the readers, which are much more powerful, should take more responsibility in RFID cryptographic protocols. In this paper, we make a radical shift from traditional cryptography, and design a novel cipher called Pandaka¹, in which most workload is pushed to the readers. As a result, Pandaka is particularly hardware-efficient for tags. We perform extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of Pandaka. In addition, we present security analysis of Pandaka facing different attacks.