Abstract:
IoT devices collect and process information from remote locations and have significantly increased the productivity of ubiquitous networks. Smart sensing devices spanning the IoT ecosystem do not have powerful processors and the amount of memory is usually measured in kilobytes, so the traditional mechanisms can not be installed on the sensing layer resource constraint devices. The ultrahigh-frequency passive RFID tags are the most adopted resource constraint IoT devices that use ultralightweight mutual authentication protocols for the authenticated encryption of the tag/reader communication. In this thesis, the design flaws of ultralightweight ciphers are analyzed by challenging their confdentiality, integrity, and availability claims. These highlighted weaknesses are rectified by proposing the Extremely Good Privacy (EGP) protocol. The proposed cipher offers mutual authentication and the tag’s ID encipherment. The security characteristics of the EGP protocol i.e. resilience against full disclosure, traceability, impersonation, and denial of service attacks have been validated using formal and functional analysis. In addition to this, the 96-bit EGP protocol is experimentally validated as an ultralightweight cipher by deploying the ASIC architecture with an implementation cost of 3826 gate equivalents. This cost is within the upper bound of 5400 gate equivalents, the resource
utilization benchmark for the ultralightweight ciphers. In the present era, quantum computing has challenged binary computing fundamentals. Quantum computing has the ability to reduce the time complexity of brute force attacks on the ultralightweight cipher by quadratic factor. The final contribution of this work is an early step towards the security and privacy of the RFID system counterpart of the post-Moore era. The Quantum Resilient Ultralightweight Authentication Protocol (QRUAP) is a hybrid cipher that ensures information-theoretically secure communication by virtue of the non-cloning property of the quantum channel. The theoretical verification of the cipher is also presented using IBM Qiskit. In addition to this, the 32-bit QRUAP emulation can be classified as a classical ultralightweight cipher by virtue of its implementation cost of 5418 gate equivalents on 180nm CMOS technology.
