International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 10 August 2015

Gangqiang Yang, Mark D. Aagaard, Guang Gong
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) are very important for EPC Class 1 Generation 2 (EPC C1 G2) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. A PRNG is able to provide a 16-bit random number that is used in many commands of the EPC C1 G2 standard, and it can also be used in future security extensions of the EPC C1 G2 standard, such as mutual authentication protocols between the readers and tags. In this paper, we investigate efficient ASIC hardware implementations of Warbler (a lightweight PRNG), and demonstrate that Warbler can meet the area and

power consumption requirements in passive RFID systems. Warbler is built upon three nonlinear feedback shift registers (NLFSRs) and four WG-5 transformation modules. We employ two design options to implement Warbler and three different compilation methods to further optimize the area, maximum operating frequency, and power consumption. We can achieve an area of 498 GEs after the place and route phase in a CMOS 65nm ASIC, with a maximum frequency of 1430 MHz and a total power consumption of 1.239 uW at 100 KHz. Accordingly, an area of 534 GEs after the place and route phase, with a maximum frequency of 250 MHz and a total power consumption of 0.296 uW at 100 KHz can be obtained in a CMOS 130nm ASIC. Our results show that the LFSR counter based

design is better than the binary counter-based one in terms of area and power consumption. In addition, we show that the areas of WG-5 transformation look-up tables depend on the specific decimation values.

Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.