Revision of J3Gen and Validity of the Attacks by Peinado et al.

This letter is the reply to: Remarks on Peinado et al.'s Analysis of J3Gen by J. Garcia-Alfaro, J. Herrera-Joancomartí and J. Melià-Seguí published in Sensors 2015, 15, 6217-6220. Peinado et al. cryptanalyzed the pseudorandom number generator proposed by Melià-Seguí et al., describing two possible attacks. Later, Garcia-Alfaro claimed that one of this attack did not hold in practice because the assumptions made by Peinado et al. were not correct. This letter reviews those remarks, showing that J3Gen is anyway flawed and that, without further information, the interpretation made by Peinado et al. seems to be correct.

EPCGen2 pseudorandom number generators: analysis of J3Gen.

This paper analyzes the cryptographic security of J3Gen, a promising pseudo random number generator for low-cost passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Although J3Gen has been shown to fulfill the randomness criteria set by the EPCglobal Gen2 standard and is intended for security applications, we describe here two cryptanalytic attacks that question its security claims: (i) a probabilistic attack based on solving linear equation systems; and (ii) a deterministic attack based on the decimation of the output sequence. Numerical results, supported by simulations, show that for the specific recommended values of the configurable parameters, a low number of intercepted output bits are enough to break J3Gen. We then make some recommendations that address these issues.

A simple linearization of the self-shrinking generator by means of cellular automata.

In this work, it is shown that the output sequence of a well-known cryptographic generator, the so-called self-shrinking generator, can be obtained from a simple linear model based on cellular automata. In fact, such a cellular model is a linear version of a nonlinear keystream generator currently used in stream ciphers. The linearization procedure is immediate and is based on the concatenation of a basic structure. The obtained cellular automata can be easily implemented with FPGA logic. Linearity and symmetry properties in such automata can be advantageously exploited for the analysis and/or cryptanalysis of this particular type of sequence generator.