RFIDs and Swarms security schemes

Shlomi Dolev

Abstract:

Two recent works on security in the RFID and swarm young domains will be described.

For RFIDs: We consider repeated communication sessions between a RFID Tag (e.g., Radio Frequency Identification, RFID Tag) and a RFID Verifier. A proactive information theoretic security scheme is proposed. The scheme is based on the assumption that the information exchanged during at least one of every n successive communication sessions is not exposed to an adversary. The Tag and the Verifier maintain a vector of n entries that is repeatedly refreshed by pairwise xoring entries, with a new vector of n entries that is randomly chosen by the Tag and sent to the Verifier as a part of each communication session. A computational secure scheme which is based on the information theoretic secure scheme is used to ensure that even in the case that the adversary listens to all the information exchanges, the communication between the Tag and the Verifier is secure.

For Swarms: Secret sharing is a fundamental cryptographic task. Motivated by the virtual automata abstraction and swarm computing, we investigate an extension of the k-secret sharing scheme, in which the secret shares are changed on the fly, independently and without (internal) communication, as a reaction to a global external trigger. The changes are made while maintaining the requirement that k or more secret shares may reconstruct the secret and no k − 1 or fewer can do so. The application considered is a swarm of mobile processes, each maintaining a share of the secret which may change according to common outside inputs, e.g., inputs received by sensors attached to the process. The proposed schemes support addition and removal of processes from the swarm, as well as corruption of a small portion of the processes in the swarm.

The talk is based on joint works with Marina Kopeetsky, Adi Shamir, Limor Lahiani and Moti Yung

Time and Place

19 November 2008 (Wednesday) at 1630 hrs
Gates 4B (opposite 490)