An Improved Minimalist Cryptography

Abstract—Security is one of key problems in RFID application. This research is to find a security algorithm for RFID with very low computing requirement. Minimalist Cryptography only needs exclusive Or (XOR) and simple logical control, and it can protect privacy and provide mutual authentication. However, the algorithm has hidden security problems while assuming that the attacker couldn’t monitor the data between RFID readers and tags for continuous sessions. The paper proved this weakness and put forward three ways to improve the weakness, i.e. channel encryption etc. The attacker could only crack the improved algorithm by brute-force attack. The experimental result showed that even by brute-force attack the attack needs more continues sessions after improvement, the cracking time and the record number needed for cracking increased with improved algorithm, and the cracking difficulty increases exponentially when the length of channel key increases, and the encryption complication increases in liner. The improved Minimalist Cryptography provided a safer lightweight security algorithm for RFID.