How to Develop ECC-Based Low Cost RFID Tags Robust Against Side-Channel Attacks

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags using asymmetric cryptography are more and more proposed to solve the well-known issue of symmetric-based tags, key distribution. In the asymmetric cryptography family, the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) primitive is often used due to its advantages in security and implementation costs. However, these ECC-based tags must still be hardened against hardware fault attacks (e.g., Side-Channel Attacks and Fault attacks). Balancing between the implementation costs and the security level is challenging since when the security level is improved, the implementation cost also increases much. Finding optimal implementations against hardware attacks is a system-level problem that must be taken authentication protocol security attributes and cryptography primitive costs into account. This paper proposes a methodology to develop low-cost ECC-based tags, ensuring robustness against Side-Channel Attacks. For that, a comparison of various authentication protocols and different ECC algorithms is first given, then an experimental setup is described to allow validating the implementations and measuring the robustness of the tag.