Abstract
We present measurements of spurious emission produced by high-frequency radio frequency identification (HF RFID) using carrier frequency of 13.56 MHz. HF RFID tags produce unwanted emission due to rectification and more generally due to nonlinearity of analog front end. Depending on the conducting material of an HF RFID coil and surrounding dielectric material, the coil behaves as more or less good antenna on some harmonic frequencies. Exact characterization and analysis of unwanted emission is important from the security perspective as well as from the perspective of interference with other systems. Consequently we measured the harmonics produced in the integrated circuitry and characterized radiation properties of the antenna. Finally we present the measurements of the spurious emission performed in a Gigahertz Transverse Electromagnetic (GTEM) cell.
Highlights
The investigation of spurious emissions produced by contactless chip-cards is of interest due to potential interference with other systems and due to security and privacy concerns
We present measurements of spurious emission produced by high-frequency radio frequency identification (HF RFID) using carrier frequency of 13.56 MHz
We have investigated spurious emission from the HF RFID tags
Summary
The investigation of spurious emissions produced by contactless chip-cards is of interest due to potential interference with other systems and due to security and privacy concerns. Some systems (building access and inventory systems) use uncoded data on the tags which are vulnerable to reply style attacks In these systems the information is transmitted at the fundamental frequency through magnetic field which is proportional to the inverse cube of the distance [1]; the distance at which the unwanted emission is detectable is quite small, couple of meters. The strength of the harmonics produced by the circuitry strongly depends on the power induced in it so spurious emission produced by a tag is higher if the reader uses higher power. This can be a reason for an attack of malware on a reader.
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