Micro-Trivium: A lightweight algorithm designed for radio frequency identification systems

Distributed sensor networks have been widely applied to healthcare, environmental monitoring and management, intelligent transportation, and other fields in which network sensors collect and transmit information about their surrounding environment. Radio frequency identification technology transmits an object’s identification as a unique serial number—using radio waves as the transmission carrier—and is becoming an important building block for distributed sensor networks. However, the security of radio frequency identification systems is a major industrial concern that can significantly hinder the market growth of distributed sensor networks. Trivium is a well-known lightweight synchronous stream cipher that was submitted to the European eSTREAM project in April 2005. In this article, we generalize Trivium to the Trivium-Model algorithm and highlight that security is mainly determined by the internal state bits and the number of nonlinear terms. We propose principles for choosing parameters and generating better parameters that are feasible for low-cost radio frequency identification tags in distributed sensor networks. The new algorithm, named Micro-Trivium, requires less power and a smaller chip area than the original Trivium, which is proven using experimental data and results. Mathematical analysis shows that using Micro-Trivium is as secure as using Trivium.