An ultra-light PRNG passing strict randomness tests and suitable for low cost tags

Abstract

A pseudo-random number generator for low-cost RFID tags is presented. The scheme is simple sequential and secure yet has a high performance. Despite its lowest hardware complexity our proposal represents a better alternative than previous proposals for low-cost tags. The scheme is based on the well-founded pseudo random number generator Mersenne Twister. The proposed generator takes low-entropy seeds extracted from a physical characteristic of the tag and produces outputs that pass popular randomness tests. Contrarily previous proposal tests are based on random number inputs from a popular online source which are simply unavailable to tags. The high performance and satisfactory randomness of present work are supported by extensive test results and compared with similar previous works. Comparison using proven estimation formulae indicates that our proposal has the best hardware complexity power consumption and the least cost. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.