The proposed consortium of CEA-LETI, EURECOM, France Télécom R+D, and INRIA offers an excellent range of complementary skills. It is well-placed to achieve the goals of the project.

While the INRIA PLANETE group is expert in protocol design, France Télécom R+D is particularly skilled in the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms. At the same time, the practical relevance of the work in the project will be maintained by CEA-LETI which is expert in low-level/physical air interface design. In more detail, the expertise of the partners is described below.

CEA-LETI

Co-ordinator:             F. Vacherand

Personnel involved:     E. Crochon, O. Savry

The LETI is an applied research laboratory in electronics. It is recognized world-wide by many industrialists who use the work that has originated here. In the areas of contactless systems and secure components, LETI has 15 years of work, including more than twenty patents, in the development of industrial prototypes for ticketing (subway tickets and readers/ terminals), contactless payments, medical implants, and RFID labels. LETI also provides seven years of security evaluation within the framework of the common criteria (via the CESTI laboratory) and has participated in the standardization committees ISO SC17 and SC 31 (contactless smart cards and electronic labels) since 1995 (AFNOR). LETI is frequently invited as a technical expert to take part in international meetings (ISO in particular) The R&D activities of the LETI in the field of the protection of contactless devices take two principle forms: (a) the implementation of electronic secure functions into the reader-tags system, and (b) the use of a specific and external electronic device for secure control.

EURECOM

Co-ordinator:             R. Molva

Personnel involved:     E-O. Blass, Y. Roudier, P. Michiardi, M. Önen

Institut Eurécom is a graduate school of engineering and a research institute in telecommunications located in Sophia Antipolis, France.  It is a consortium of industrial and academic members including Télécom Paris, EPFL, Swisscom, Hasler Stiftung, Thalès, SFR, France Telecom, HITACHI Europe, Texas Instruments, ST Microelectronics, Bouygues Telecom, SHARP, BMW, CISCO, Politecnico di Torino and Helsinki University of Technology.

Eurécom employs 70 scientists in three research departments: computer communications, multimedia and mobile communications. In RFID-AP, Eurécom will be represented by its network security research team (NSTEAM) that consists of 4 faculty, 4 research engineers and a dozen PhD students. NSTEAM actively conducts research in the area of applied cryptography for security protocols and network security since 15 years. NSTEAM currently participates in several European projects such as the NoE Resist on security and dependability, the FET projects HAGGLE, CASCADAS, the STREP MOSQUITO in the area of security for autonomous systems, the R4eGov IP in the area of secure e-government and several national projects on communication security such as CADHO and MOSAIC of ACI Sécurité and ACES of the RNRT programmes.   It recently took part in the PRIME IP on privacy and identity management and the SPLASH project of the ACI Sécurité on the security of ad hoc networks. NSTEAM’s interest in RFID-AP is mainly in the area of privacy preserving security protocols, their design, evaluation of their security and prototyping.

FTRD

Co-ordinator:             M. Robshaw

Personnel involved:     H. Gilbert, Y. Seurin (Paris)

                                    S. Canard, M. Girault, L. Juniot (Caen)

The France Télécom group is a global telecommunications operator that is present in more than 200 countries with 145 million clients. The Research and Development group has close to 4000 researchers and engineers in 15 laboratories on three continents. Each year 500 patents are filed. France Télécom R+D maintains good open and collaborative academic connections via public initiatives such as pôles de compétitivité, ANR, and a variety of international research programs. France Télécom R+D has a strong background in the design of lightweight security solutions for payment applications such as ticketing and has developed, or been co-developers of, some of the most lightweight cryptographic algorithms available including the public-key identification scheme GPS, due to Girault, Poupard, and Stern, which is the only public-key cryptography suitable for deployment on RFID tags. Scientists from FTRD that will be working on RFID-AP specify security algorithms for telecommunication systems (ETSI/SAGE), and have contributed to numerous national or European research projects (RNRT, ANR, Eurescom, IST). FTRD is also an active contributor to the EU Framework VI ECRYPT Network of Excellence. In this project FTRD manage the eSTREAM project which is a multi-year effort devoted to the search for hardware-efficient stream ciphers, much in line with the proposed RFID-AP project.

INRIA

Co-ordinator:             C. Castelluccia

The INRIA PLANETE group is a research group working on security and networking protocols with a significant expertise in protocol design. The PLANETE group has co-authored several papers on key exchange, secret handshake, secure authentication, and secure aggregation techniques for wireless systems. With specific application to the proposed project, PLANETE has proposed a novel RFID key exchange protocol based on noisy tags and an efficient random number generator for constrained devices (such as RFIDs or sensors).

Partnership complementarities

Individually, each of the four partners in RFIDAP brings considerable expertise and experience. However, it is the synergy between the groups that is likely to yield an appealing project, most particularly because the areas of expertise of each partner interface well to the others in the partnership.

While INRIA will provide its technical expertise in security and innovative protocol design, this will be complemented with the cryptographic expertise of France Télécom. EURECOM already has a long experience in the design and analysis of security protocols, with a particular interest in authentication and key management, which would be ideal match to the others in the project. Underpinning, and complementing, the work of the other partners, CEALETI will bring a substantial technical expertise in general electronics, micro- and nano-technologies, radio communication and a good understanding of the behaviour of the physical layer, RFID systems in general, and secure components in particular. The anticipated collaboration between the project partners are therefore expected to pave the way for new developments; potentially in the design of lightweight crypto primitives, in the design of new protocols, in prototypes of the noisy-tag environment, and in considering the impact of different protocol layers when addressing privacy issues. 

Throughout the project, inter-partner co-operation will be increased through common PhD and post-doctoral work within the consortium.