A Practical Implementation Attack on Weak Pseudorandom Number Generator Designs for EPC Gen2 Tags

The Electronic Product Code Generation 2 (EPC Gen2) is an international standard that proposes the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the supply chain. It is designed to balance cost and functionality. As a consequence, security on board of EPC Gen2 tags is often minimal. It is, indeed,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Wireless personal communications 2011-07, Vol.59 (1), p.27-42
Main Authors: Melia Segui, Joan, Garcia Alfaro, Joaquin, Herrera Joancomarti, Jordi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communications Engineering
Computer Communication Networks
Computer Science
Cryptography and Security
Engineering
Networks
Signal,Image and Speech Processing
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Summary:The Electronic Product Code Generation 2 (EPC Gen2) is an international standard that proposes the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the supply chain. It is designed to balance cost and functionality. As a consequence, security on board of EPC Gen2 tags is often minimal. It is, indeed, mainly based on the use of on board pseudorandomness, used to obscure the communication between readers and tags; and to acknowledge the proper execution of password-protected operations. In this paper, we present a practical implementation attack on a weak pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) designed specifically for EPC Gen2 tags. We show that it is feasible to eavesdrop a small amount of pseudorandom values by using standard EPC commands and using them to determine the PRNG configuration that allows to predict the complete output sequence.
ISSN:0929-6212
1572-834X
DOI:10.1007/s11277-010-0187-1