Maximalist Cryptography and Computation on the WISP UHF RFID Tag

With continuous improvements in the efficiency of micro-electronics, it is now possible to power a general-purpose microcontroller wirelessly at a reasonable range. The implementation of RC5-32/12/16 on the WISP UHF RFID tag shows that conventional cryptography is no longer beyond the reach of a general-purpose UHF tag. This paper provides preliminary experimental data on how much computation is available on a TI MSP430F1232 microcontroller-based RFID tag containing approximately 8 KBytes of flash and 256 bytes of RAM.