Securing RFID Systems Using Lightweight Stream Cipher

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology for the automated identification of physical entities using radio frequency transmissions. In the past ten years, RFID systems have gained popularity in many applications, such as supply chain management, library systems, e-passports, contactless cards, identification systems, and human implantation. RFID is one of the most promising technologies in the field of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Many new applications can be created by embedding an object with RFID tags. However, the rapid development of RFID systems raises serious privacy and security concerns that could prevent the benefits of RFID technology from being fully utilized. In this talk, first I will give an overview for the proposed methods in the literature for authentications in RFID systems, then I will present a lightweight WG stream cipher for securing RFID systems, and provide the security analysis and efficient implementation of an instance of WG-8 on microcontroller.

Speaker Details

Guang Gong received a B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1981, an M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics in 1985, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1990, from Universities in China. She received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, in Rome, Italy, and spent the following year there. After returning from Italy, she was promoted to an Associate Professor at the University of Electrical Science and Technology of China. During 1995-1998, Dr. Gong worked with several internationally recognized, outstanding coding experts and cryptographers, including Dr. Solomon W. Golomb, at the University of Southern California. Dr. Gong joined the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1998, as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering in September 2000. She has been a full Professor since 2004. Dr. Gong’s research interests are in the areas of sequence design, cryptography, and communication security. She has authored or co-authored more than 240 technical papers and two books, one co-authored with Dr. Golomb, entitled as Signal Design for Good Correlation for Wireless Communication, Cryptography and Radar, published by Cambridge Press in 2005, and the other coauthored with Dr. Lidong Chen, Communication System Security, published by CRC 2012. Dr. Gong serves/served as Associate Editors for several journals including Associate Editor for Sequences for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and served on a number of technical program committees and conferences as co-chairs or committee members. Dr. Gong has received several awards including the Best Paper Award from the Chinese Institute of Electronics in 1984, Outstanding Doctorate Faculty Award of Sichuan Province, China, in 1991, the Premier’s Research Excellence Award, Ontario, Canada, in 2001, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement Award, 2009, Canada, and Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence Award, 2010, Canada, Best Paper Award of IEEE ICC 2012. She currently serves as the Managing Director of the Center of Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR) at University of Waterloo.