Securing qr codes by rsa on fpga

QR codes, intended for maximum accessibility are widely in use these days and can be scanned readily by mobile phones. Their ease of accessibility makes them vulnerable to attacks and tampering. Certain scenarios require a QR code to be accessed by a group of users only. This is done by making the QR code cryptographically secure with the help of a password (key) for encryption and decryption. Symmetric key algorithms like AES requires the sender and the receiver to have a shared secret key. However, the whole motive of security fails if the shared key is not secure enough. Therefore, in our design we secure the key, which is a grey image using RSA algorithm. In this paper, FPGA implementation of 1024 bit RSA encryption and decryption is presented. For encryption, computation of modular exponentiation for 1024 bit size with accuracy and efficiency is needed and it is carried out by repeated modular multiplication technique. For decryption, L-R binary approach is used which deploys modular multiplication module. Efficiency in our design is achieved in terms of throughput/area ratio as compared to existing implementations. QR codes security is demonstrated by deploying AES-RSA hybrid design in Xilinx System Generator(XSG). XSG helps in hardware co-simulation and reduces the difficulty in structural design. Further, to ensure efficient encryption of the shared key by RSA, histograms of the images of key before and after encryption are generated and analysed for strength of encryption.