Implementation of symmetric algorithms on a synthesizable 8-bit microcontroller targeting passive RFID tags

Authors:
Thomas Plos;Hannes Groß;Martin Feldhofer
Affiliations:
Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria;Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria;Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Venue:
SAC'10 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Selected areas in cryptography
Year:
2010

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Abstract

The vision of the secure Internet-of-Things is based on the use of security-enhanced RFID technology. In this paper, we describe the implementation of symmetric-key primitives on passive RFID tags. Our approach uses a fully synthesizable 8-bit microcontroller that executes, in addition to the communication protocol, also various cryptographic algorithms. The microcontroller was designed to fulfill the fierce constraints concerning chip area and power consumption in passive RFID tags. The architecture is flexible in terms of used program size and the number of used registers which allows an evaluation of various algorithms concerning their required resources. We analyzed the block ciphers AES, SEA, Present and XTEA as well as the stream cipher Trivium. The achieved results show that our approach is more efficient than other dedicated microcontrollers and even better as optimized hardware modules when considering the combination of controlling tasks on the tag and executing cryptographic algorithms.