JSpongeGen: A pseudo random generator for low resource devices

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a new lightweight pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) scheme for low-cost Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags named JSpongeGen. EPC Gen2 RFID tags are used worldwide and considered as international standards. However, these are the low resource devices and even unable to support symmetric key based cryptographic operation. Although various promising PRNG generation schemes for RFID tags have been proposed, developing a lightweight and secure scheme which also fulfills the randomness criteria is one of the open research problems. To this end, we propose JSpongeGen, a lightweight and secure mechanism that satisfies NIST randomness tests and also fulfills EPC Gen2 randomness criteria. Our proposed scheme is based on multiple polynomial dynamic feedback shift register in which we added a sponge function to update the contents of the shift register during the change of feedback polynomial. We show that our scheme outperforms one of the promising lightweight schemes in certain randomness metrics while remaining lightweight and secure solution.