Title: A DPA-resistant crypto engine for UHF RFID tag

Authors: Linghao Zhu; Cheng Wu; Linyin Wu; Junyu Wang; Hao Min

Addresses: State Key Lab of ASIC and System, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' State Key Lab of ASIC and System, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' State Key Lab of ASIC and System, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' State Key Lab of ASIC and System, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' State Key Lab of ASIC and System, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

Abstract: Differential power analysis (DPA) is a potential threat to the security of radio frequency identification (RFID) system. In this paper, the hardware implementation of a DPA-resistant crypto engine for RFID tag conforming to ISO/IEC 18000-63 protocol is presented. The masking scheme is adopted in the AES crypto engine to protect the tag from DPA attacks. The design is implemented using 0.13 µm CMOS technology. According to simulation results, the DPA-resistant crypto engine occupies 38% more area and consumes 20% more power than the unmasked one. The area of the whole tag baseband including the DPA-resistant crypto engine is about 163,000 µm². The average power consumption during a query round is 21.2 µW under 1 V voltage and 1.28 MHz clock frequency.

Keywords: radio frequency identification; RFID tags; differential power analysis; DPA attacks; SCAs; side-channel attacks; RFID security; AES crypto engines; masking scheme; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2015.069986

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2015 Vol.7 No.2, pp.123 - 132

Received: 17 Jan 2014
Accepted: 03 May 2014
Published online: 22 Jun 2015 *

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