A Do-It-All-Cipher for RFID: Design Requirements (Extended Abstract)

Recent years have seen significant progress in the development of lightweight symmetric cryptoprimitives. The main concern of the designers of these primitives has been to minimize the number of gate equivalents (GEs) of the hardware implementation. However, there are numerous additional requirements that are present in real-life RFID systems. We give an overview of requirements emerging or already present in the widely deployed EPCGlobal Gen2 and ISO / IEC 18000-63 passive UHF RFID air interface standards. Lightweight stateful authenticated encryption algorithms seem to offer the most complete set of features for this purpose. In this work we give a Gen2-focused ”lessons learned” overview of the challenges and related developments in RFID cryptography and propose what we see as appropriate design criteria for a cipher (dubbed “Do-It-All-Cipher” or DIAC) for the Internet of Things. We also comment on the applicability of NSA’s new SIMON and SPECK proposals for this purpose