Reprogrammable Processor Design for RFID Cryptographic Applications (T-0410) (MFN 5062)

Abstract

With the development of IoT, the application usage of RFID tags has become very substantial. These RFID tags use cryptographic protocols for the authentication which is carried out between the tag and their reader. These tags have very limited resources, therefore the authentication protocol used by them have to use very restricted operations. Most of the authentication protocols used by these tags fall into the ultralightweight category. Several researchers have proposed different ultralightweight protocols. With the passage of time loopholes were discovered in these algorithms and they were modified or some new protocols came into existence. When an algorithm is breached by someone, the hardware in which that algorithm is being run becomes futile. This causes a waste of the tags. Therefore we designed a reconfigurable processor for RFID tags which can carry out some specific operations. Even if the running algorithm in them is breached we just have to reprogram it for another algorithm instead of throwing it away. This would result in a huge benefit regarding the conservation of our resources. This processor can even run a new operation named recursive hash that has never been implemented before. For synthesis we used Xilinx ISE, and device used for synthesis is of Spartan 3E family. The slice count for our processor was 5534 and 3510 for 96 and 16 bit processor. The maximum frequency which the processor can operate on is 52 MHz. If the memory blocks of the processor are excluded then the resultant slice count for 96 bit processor is 945