A practical implementation attack on weak pseudorandom number generator designs for EPC Gen2 tags

Abstract

The Electronic Product Code Generation 2 (EPC Gen2) is an international standard that proposes the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the supply chain. It is designed to balance cost and functionality. As a consequence, security on board of EPC Gen2 tags is often minimal. It is, indeed, mainly based on the use of on board pseudorandomness, used to obscure the communication between readers and tags; and to acknowledge the proper execution of password-protected operations. In this paper, we present a practical implementation attack on a weak pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) designed specifically for EPC Gen2 tags. We show that it is feasible to eavesdrop a small amount of pseudorandom values by using standard EPC commands and using them to determine the PRNG configuration that allows to predict the complete output sequence.