Improved Lightweight Pseudo-Random Number Generators for the Low-Cost RFID Tags

EPC Gen2 tags are working as international RFID standards for the use in the supply chain worldwide, such tags are computationally weak devices and unable to perform even basic symmetric-key cryptographic operations. For this reason, to implement robust and secure pseudo-random number generators (PRNG) is a challenging issue for low-cost Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. In this paper, we study the security of LFSR-based PRNG implemented on EPC Gen2 tags and exploit LFSR-based PRNG to provide a better constructions. We provide a cryptanalysis against the J3Gen which is LFSR-based PRNG and proposed by Sugei et al. [1], [2] for EPC Gen2 tags using distinguish attack and make observations on its input using NIST randomness test. We also test the PRNG in EPC Gen2 RFID Tags by using the NIST SP800-22. As a counter-measure, we propose two modified models based on the security analysis results. We show that our results perform better than J3Gen in terms of computational and statistical property.