Implementation of a secured digital ultralight 14443-type A RFID tag with an FPGA platform

Radio Frequency Identification tags are widely used in many daily living systems such as transport, access control, electronic passports, ticketing and payment. The communication between reader and RFID tags uses a wireless channel in which the security and privacy requirements are satisfied via the implementation of cryptographic modules and secured authentication protocols. However, current commercial data encryption modules are too expensive in terms of area and power for low cost passive RFID tags. In this paper, we propose a FPGA platform to validate the digital architecture of an ultralight 14443-type A RFID tag. As a case study, we propose to integrate the ultralight PRESENT encryption module in the commercial MIFARE authentication protocol.