Hu-Fu: Replay-Resilient RFID Authentication

Abstract

We provide the first solution to an important question, “how a physical-layer authentication method can defend against signal replay attacks”. It was believed that if an attacker can replay the exact same reply signal of a legitimate authentication object (such as an RFID tag), any physical-layer authentication method will fail. This paper presents Hu-Fu, the first physical layer RFID authentication protocol that is resilient to the major attacks including tag counterfeiting, signal replay, signal compensation, and brute-force feature reply. Hu-Fu is built on two fundamental ideas, namely inductive coupling of two tags and signal randomization. Hu-Fu does not require any hardware or protocol modification on COTS passive tags and can be implemented with COTS devices. We implement a prototype of Hu-Fu and demonstrate that it is accurate and robust to device diversity and environmental changes, including locations, distance, and temperature. Hu-Fu provides a new direction of battery-free/low-power device authentication that enables numerous IoT applications.