Low-cost Radio Frequency Identification Tags Research Articles

ESRAS: An efficient and secure ultra-lightweight RFID authentication scheme for low-cost tags

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies rapidly evolve and are used in many real-life applications. One of the core technologies used in various IoT applications is Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. RFID wirelessly and uniquely identifies the tagged objects without a direct line of sight. However, the research community had reported privacy and security-related concerns in RFID systems, where an adversary may tamper, eavesdrop, add, delete, or even modify the transmitted messages over an insecure communication channel.To address the issues mentioned above, we propose an Efficient, Secure, and practical ultra-lightweight RFID Authentication Scheme (ESRAS), which uses rank operation for low-cost tags. We utilize a simplistic bitwise exclusive-OR, circular left rotation, and a newly proposed ultra-lightweight rank operation to provide high security at low cost. The analysis of ESRAS concerning its security and performance shows that it effectively resists several known attacks and is relatively superior to the existing schemes regarding the computational and storage costs. Moreover, ESRAS shows more suitability for low-cost RFID tags and can be executed in a multimedia big data environment.

RUAP: Random rearrangement block matrix-based ultra-lightweight RFID authentication protocol for end-edge-cloud collaborative environment

Cloud computing provides powerful processing capabilities for large-scale intelligent Internet of things (IoT) terminals. However, the massive realtime data processing requirements challenge the existing cloud computing model. The edge server is closer to the data source. The end-edge-cloud collaboration offloads the cloud computing tasks to the edge environment, which solves the shortcomings of the cloud in resource storage, computing performance, and energy consumption. IoT terminals and sensors have caused security and privacy challenges due to resource constraints and exponential growth. As the key technology of IoT, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) authentication protocol tremendously strengthens privacy protection and improves IoT security. However, it inevitably increases system overhead while improving security, which is a major blow to low-cost RFID tags. The existing RFID authentication protocols are difficult to balance overhead and security. This paper designs an ultra-lightweight encryption function and proposes an RFID authentication scheme based on this function for the end-edge-cloud collaborative environment. The BAN logic proof and protocol verification tools AVISPA formally verify the protocol's security. We use VIVADO to implement the encryption function and tag's overhead on the FPGA platform. Performance evaluation indicates that the proposed protocol balances low computing costs and high-security requirements.

ARMOR: An Anti-Counterfeit Security Mechanism for Low Cost Radio Frequency Identification Systems

Counterfeited products are costing the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Radio frequency identification(RFID) technology provides a promising solution for this problem, wherein each product is fitted with a secure tag, which is difficult to forge. However, RFID technology is faced with numerous security threats, for example, if the communication link between the reader and the tag is compromised, then it will be possible for a malicious adversary to obtain the private data stored on the device. Tag cloning attacks have also been demonstrated to be feasible, which severely undermines the capabilities of the RFID technology to protect against counterfeiting. One solution to this problem is the use of authentication protocol; however, existing schemes do not support mutual authentication and are still vulnerable to tag cloning attacks. In this article, a new security mechanism is proposed, which consists of a lightweight three-flights mutual authentication protocol and an anti-counterfeit tag design. The proposed solution is based on combining the Rabin public-key encryption scheme with physically unclonable functions (PUF) technology. The security of the proposed protocol is systematically analysed and compared with existing schemes. The implementation cost of the proposed security primitives, assuming the 1024-bit public key, is 10139 GEs, which is suitable for low-cost RFID tags. Our results show that the proposed design is up-to 50 percent more area-efficient compared to systems based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).

Machine vision methodology for inkjet printing drop sequence generation and validation

Inkjet printing technology for printed microelectronics suffers from a number of non-idealities due to unwanted ink flow on the substrate. This can be mitigated and pattern fidelity can be improved by using an optimized drop placement sequence in contrast to the standard raster-scanning approach. However, it is challenging to auto-generate such printing sequences for complex printed patterns. Here, the generation and evaluation of the printing sequence are turned into a computer-vision problem. The desired printed pattern is taken as an input image and converted into a printing sequence using contour, symmetric, and matrix sequencing and corner compensation. After printing, pattern defects are detected by automated image processing to evaluate the printed pattern against the designed ground truth image and to determine the best possible algorithm for printing sequence generation for different pattern types. The machine vision-based experimental approach identifies the best solutions for solving the printing and defect optimization problem in terms of precision, recall, and accuracy. This methodology will enable the automated design of electronic circuits for applications such as wearable sensors, low-cost radio-frequency identification tags, or flexible displays.

Sitsen: Passive sitting posture sensing based on wireless devices

Physical health diseases caused by wrong sitting postures are becoming increasingly serious and widespread, especially for sedentary students and workers. Existing video-based approaches and sensor-based approaches can achieve high accuracy, while they have limitations like breaching privacy and relying on specific sensor devices. In this work, we propose Sitsen, a non-contact wireless-based sitting posture recognition system, just using radio frequency signals alone, which neither compromises the privacy nor requires using various specific sensors. We demonstrate that Sitsen can successfully recognize five habitual sitting postures with just one lightweight and low-cost radio frequency identification tag. The intuition is that different postures induce different phase variations. Due to the received phase readings are corrupted by the environmental noise and hardware imperfection, we employ series of signal processing schemes to obtain clean phase readings. Using the sliding window approach to extract effective features of the measured phase sequences and employing an appropriate machine learning algorithm, Sitsen can achieve robust and high performance. Extensive experiments are conducted in an office with 10 volunteers. The result shows that our system can recognize different sitting postures with an average accuracy of 97.02%.

Asynchronous Reception of 2 RFID Tags

Commercial radio frequency identification (RFID) readers have to resolve collisions between tags, without sacrificing throughput. This work proposes a Viterbi <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">joint sequence detector</i> as well as a 2-symbol joint tag information detector that can resolve a collision between two tags in the physical layer. In sharp contrast to prior art, the proposed closed-form signal model takes into account the asynchrony level between the two collided tag responses, which is not uncommon with commercial, low-cost RFID tags that follow industry’s Gen2 protocol. The asynchrony is considered as the time offset <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau $ </tex-math></inline-formula> between the beginnings of the two tags’ responses and is modeled through a derived <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">shaping</i> matrix that depends on the delayed tag information. Performance evaluation of the proposed detectors with simulated data under Ricean fading, as well as experimental data with software-defined radio, reveals improved performance compared to prior art, under various operating regimes. It is also shown that for different values of the parameter <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau $ </tex-math></inline-formula> , BER does not present a monotonic behaviour. As a collateral dividend, it is found that clustering techniques on the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">filtered</i> received signal should explicitly take into account the time offset <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau $ </tex-math></inline-formula> , since the latter modifies the number of observed clusters.

MUMAP: Modified Ultralightweight Mutual Authentication protocol for RFID enabled IoT networks

Flawed authentication protocols led to the need for a secured protocol for radio frequency identification (RFID) techniques. In this paper, an authentication protocol named Modified ultralightweight mutual authentication protocol (MUMAP) has been proposed and cryptanalysed by Juel-Weis challenge. The proposed protocol aimed to reduce memory requirements in the authentication process for low-cost RFID tags with limited resources. Lightweight operations like XOR and Left Rotation, are used to circumvent the flaws made in the other protocols. The proposed protocol has three-phase of authentication. Security analysis of the proposed protocol proves its resistivity against attacks like desynchronization, disclosure, tracking, and replay attack. On the other hand, performance analysis indicates that it is an effective protocol to use in low-cost RFID tags. Juel-Weis challenge verifies the proposed protocol where it shows insusceptibility against modular operations.

Microwave Characterization of Chitosan Hydrogel and Its Use as a Wireless pH Sensor in Smart Packaging Applications

pH is an important parameter in cold chain applications, identified as a key food freshness indicator, especially in perishables. In view of this, in recent years the traction of low-cost RFID tags has increased, especially in the domain of physical parameter sensing. In this paper, we present the electromagnetic characterization of the chitosan-based hydrogel in ultra-wideband (UWB) frequencies, and its use as a pH sensor with chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) resonators. This paper also shows the complete preparation process of hydrogel, and how chitosan hydrogel changes its physical responses to different pH levels. Moreover, we show the changing hydrogel’s physical properties and its correlation with changes in frequency response, enabling low-cost pH sensing in UWB. Chipless RFID sensors are relatively low-cost, but they offer enormous design flexibility in diversified applications such as cold chain, smart packaging, and digital agriculture.

EUMD: Efficient slot utilization based missing tag detection with unknown tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which obtained significant development in the past several decades, is widely applied in numerous industrial applications. One of the typical applications is to detect the missing tags, which can perform real-time detection of missing objects while each object is attached with a low-cost RFID tag in a large-scale warehouse. However, there actually may be a large number of unknown tags whose IDs are not known by reader to disturb the missing tag detection. The existence of unknown tags not only reduces the detection efficiency but also affects the detection reliability. Unfortunately, some existing missing tag detection protocols fail to deal with the interferences of unknown tags well. In this paper, we propose an efficient and reliable scheme called EUMD which consists of two phases to detect the missing tags. In particular, EUMD introduces the grid table to improve the ratio of empty slots to enhance the deactivation efficiency in the first phase. In the second phase, Hash function based on ID shifting is deployed to improve the utilization of singleton slots. After that, extensive simulations are conducted, which demonstrate that the execution efficiency of EUMD scheme can be increased at least by 20% compared with the exiting protocol.

SecMAP: A Secure RFID Mutual Authentication Protocol for Healthcare Systems

In recent years, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been applied to construct better healthcare systems, offering various healthcare services that can benefit all medical staff and patients. However, because of the insecure communication channels in RFID systems, security is a main concern to be solved for RFID to be used in healthcare systems. To address this issue, recently in 2019, Safkhani et al. proposed a lightweight RFID authentication protocol in IEEE Access. The authors claimed that their protocol has a higher security level than existing protocols in this category. This article firstly analyzes the security of Safkhani et al.'s protocol, and shows that this protocol is lack of forward secrecy and scalability. Then, a new and secure mutual authentication protocol (SecMAP) is proposed to overcome these weaknesses. The security of the SecMAP protocol is confirmed with formal analyses using the Gong-Needham-Yahalom (GNY) logic and the Scyther tool. Besides, SecMAP is compatible with low-cost RFID tags. Thus, the proposed protocol can effectively provide security for RFID based healthcare systems.

Flexible UHF RFID Tag for Blood Tubes Monitoring.

Low-cost and flexible radio frequency identification (RFID) tag for automatic identification, tracking, and monitoring of blood products is in great demand by the healthcare industry. A robust performance to meet security and traceability requirements in the different blood sample collection and analysis centers is also required. In this paper, a novel low-cost and flexible passive RFID tag is presented for blood sample collection tubes. The tag antenna is based on two compact symmetrical capacitive structures and works at the ultra-high frequency (UHF) European band (865 MHz–868 MHz). The tag antenna is designed considering the whole dielectric parameters such as the blood, substrate and tube. In this way, it operates efficiently in the presence of blood, which has high dielectric permittivity and loss. Measurement results of the proposed tag have confirmed simulation results. The measured performance of the tag shows good matching in the desired frequency band, leading to reading ranges up to 2.2 m, which is 4.4 times higher than typical commercial tags. The potential of this tag as a sensor to monitor the amount of blood contained in clinic tubes is also demonstrated. It is expected that the proposed tag can be useful and effective in future RFID systems to introduce security and traceability in different blood sample collection and analysis centers.

An Efficient Hash-Based RFID Grouping Authentication Protocol Providing Missing Tags Detection

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a promising technology which can be applied in many areas, including supply chains logistics and medical treatment. Due to practical requirements of verifying multiple objects simultaneously, the authentication towards large numbers of RFID tags or tag groups remains a hot topic. However, because of the resource limitation of low-cost RFID tags, only basic cryptographic encryptions can be applied on the tag sides. As a result, security and privacy risks towards the RFID system remain crucial issues to be solved. Additionally, in some complex scenarios such as factory or harbor, some tags may be missing or temporarily disabled due to environmental interference. In this paper, an efficient hash-based RFID grouping authentication protocol providing missing tags detection is proposed. In our assumption, each reader of the authentication system can verify large amounts of RFID tags within its ranges. Note that it is not necessary for the reader to predefine the tags into groups during large-scale authentication. Instead, the RFID system can automatically divide the tags into different groups according to the given slots and bitmap. Moreover, the proposed protocol can detect and reset the missing tags so that the missing tag can rejoin the system. Security analysis shows that this protocol can offer sufficient security assurances and resist various attacks. Subsequently, the performance analysis illustrates that the proposed protocol yields better performance than the state-of-the-art RFID grouping authentication protocols.

Low-Power Transparent RFID Circuits Using Enhancement/Depletion Logic Gates Based on Deuterium-Treated ZnO TFTs

Transparent radio frequency identification (RFID) integrated circuits based on ZnO thin film transistors were developed by using ratioed logic gates with depletion loads. The fabrication of these logic gates employed a simple deuterium plasma treatment to adjust the threshold voltages of the load transistors. Inverters were realized with full swing (0.02 ~4.99V), high gain of −48V/V, large noise margin, and small area. RFID circuits based on such logic gates exhibited ultra-low power dissipation of $8.28~\mu \text{W}$ at a supply voltage of 2.4 V and a considerably high data rate of 1.6 kb/s, which may open up possibilities for applications including transparent, low-cost RFID tags.

Efficient Hardware Implementation of KMAP+: An Ultralightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol

Internet of Things (IoTs) are becoming one of the integral parts of our lives, as all of the modern devices including pervasive systems use internet for its connectivity with the rest of the world. The Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) provides unique identification and nonline of sight capabilities, therefore plays a very important role in development of IoTs. However, the RFID systems incorporate wireless channel for communication, therefore have some allied risks to the system from threat agents. In order to prevent the system from malicious activities in a cost effective way, numerous Ultralightweight Mutual Authentication Protocols (UMAPs) have been proposed since last decade. These UMAPs mainly involve simple bitwise logical operators such as XOR, AND, OR, etc., in their designs and can be implemented with extremely low cost RFID tags. However, most of the UMAP designers didn’t provide the proper hardware approximations of their UMAPs and presented only theoretical results which mostly mislead the reader. In this paper, we have addressed this problem by reporting our experiences with FPGA and ASIC-based implementation of UMAP named psuedo Kasami code-based Mutual Authentication Protocol (KMAP[Formula: see text]. Further, we have also improved the structure of the KMAP protocol to overcome the previously highlighted attack model. The hardware implementation results show that KMAP[Formula: see text] successfully conform to EPC-C1G2 tags and can be implemented using less than 4[Formula: see text]K GE (for 32-bit word length).

Security Attacks and Enhancements to Chaotic Map-Based RFID Authentication Protocols

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been increasingly integrated into numerous applications for authentication of objects or individuals. However, because of its limited computation power, RFID technology may cause several security and privacy issues such as tracking the owner of the tag, cloning of the tags and etc. Recently, two chaotic map-based authentication protocols have been proposed for low-cost RFID tags in order to eliminate these issues. In this paper, we give the security analysis of these protocols and uncover their weaknesses. We prove that these protocols are vulnerable to tag tracing, tag impersonation and de-synchronization attacks. The attack complexity of an adversary is polynomial and the success probability of these attacks are substantial. Moreover, we also propose an improved RFID authentication protocol that employs Chebyshev chaotic maps and complies with the EPC global Class 1 Generation 2 standard. Finally, we show that our protocol is resistant against those security issues.

Experimental assessment of an RFID-based crack sensor for steel structures

The use of welded steel cover plates had been a common design practice to increase beam section capacity in regions of high moment for decades. Many steel girder bridges with cover plates are still in service. Steel girder bridges are subject to cyclic loading, which can initiate crack formation at the toe of the weld and reduce beam capacity. Thus, timely detection of fatigue cracks is of utmost importance in steel girder bridge monitoring. To date, crack monitoring methods using in-house radio frequency identification (RFID)-based sensors have been developed to complement visual inspection and provide quantitative information of damage level. Offering similar properties at a reduced cost, commercial ultra-high frequency (UHF) passive RFID tags have been identified as a more financially viable option for pervasive crack monitoring using a dense array of sensors. This paper presents a study on damage sensitivity of low-cost commercial UHF RFID tags for crack detection and monitoring on metallic structures. Using backscatter power as a parameter for damage identification, a crack sensing system has been developed for single and multiple tag configurations for increased sensing pervasiveness. The effect on backscatter power of the existence and stage of crack propagation has been successfully characterized. For further automation of crack detection, a damage index based on the variation of backscatter power has also been established. The tested commercial RFID-based crack sensor contributes to the usage of this technology on steel girder bridges.

Efficient and Reliable Missing Tag Identification for Large-Scale RFID Systems With Unknown Tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID), which promotes the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), has been an emerging technology and widely deployed in various applications such as warehouse management, supply chain management, and social networks. In such applications, objects can be efficiently managed by attaching them with low-cost RFID tags and carefully monitoring them. The missing objects, therefore, can be identified by the readers in the RFID system. Most of prior missing tag identification protocols consider the ideal scenario that all the tags’ IDs are known to the reader, which ignore that some tags with unknown IDs, called unknown tags, may be present in the system. In this paper, we investigate the problem of efficiently identifying the missing tags with a predefined reliability for large-scale RFID systems with unknown tags. We first propose a basic efficient and reliable missing tag identification protocol called B-ERMI. Then we propose an enhanced protocol called E-ERMI to further improve the efficiency. The parameters of our proposed ERMI protocols are optimized to minimize the execution time. We also conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed ERMI protocols and the simulation results illustrate that the ERMI protocols outperform other existing ones.

Security Analysis of the Qian et al. Protocol: A Revised Tree-LSHB+ Protocol

Low-cost radio-frequency identification tags are confronted with various security and privacy issues due to their limits in computational and storage capabilities. Many lightweight authentication protocols have been proposed so far to resist all possible attacks and threats. A revised Tree-LSHB+ protocol was recently proposed by Qian et al. [Wirel Pers Commun 77(4):3125–3141. doi: 10.1007/s11277-014-1699-x , 2014] after a security analysis on the original Tree-LSHB+ protocol proposed by Deng et al. [Wirel Pers Commun 72(1):159–174. doi: 10.1007/s11277-013-1006-2 , 2013]. And it claimed to be secure against secret information disclosure attack. In this paper, we present an active attack against it in a general man-in-the-middle attack where an adversary is capable of eavesdropping, intercepting, manipulating, and blocking the messages transmitted between a legitimate reader and a legitimate tag. The attack is proved to be efficient to disclose all the authentication keys shared between a reader and a tag. Additionally, we introduce another possible active attack which can even retrieve all the secrets in the tree-traversal stage.

ITPMAP: An Improved Three-Pass Mutual Authentication Protocol for Secure RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a wireless technology used in various applications to minimize the complexity of everyday life. However, it opens a large number of security and privacy issues that require to be addressed before its successful deployment. Many RFID authentication protocols are proposed in recent years to address security and privacy issues, and most of them are based on lightweight cryptographic techniques such as pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs), or bitwise logical operations. However, the existing RFID authentication protocols suffer from security weaknesses, and cannot solve most of the security and privacy problems. A new solution is necessary to address security and privacy issues. In this paper, an improved three-pass mutual authentication protocol (ITPMAP) for low-cost RFID tags is proposed to offer an adequate security level for RFID systems. The proposed ITPMAP protocol uses one PRNG on the tag side and heavy-weighted cryptographic techniques (i.e., digital signature and password-based encryption schemes) on the back-end server side instead of lightweight cryptographic techniques to address the security and privacy issues. The ITPMAP protocol is secure against various attacks such as cloning, spoofing, replay, and desynchronization attacks. Furthermore, as a proof of concept, the ITPMAP protocol is adopted to propose the design of three real-life RFID systems; namely: Signing and Verification of Graduation Certificate System, issuing and verification of e-ticketing system, and charging and discharging of prepaid card system. The Unified Modeling Language is used to demonstrate the design of the proposed ITPMAP protocol and systems. Java language is used for the implementation of the proposed systems. In addition, the “Mifare Classic” tags and readers are used as RFID apparatuses for the proposed systems.

A lightweight and anonymous RFID tag authentication protocol with cloud assistance for e-healthcare applications

As an important part of Internet of Things, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system employs low-cost RFID tag to communicate with everything containing animate and inanimate objects. This technology is widely used in the e-healthcare applications. However, the malicious communication environment makes people more and more worried. In order to overcome the hazards in the network, RFID authentication schemes for e-healthcare have been proposed by researchers. But since the computation ability of the tag is relatively weak, it is necessary to put forward a lightweight and secure scheme for medical systems. Moreover, cloud is widely accepted by people and used in many kinds of systems. So we propose a novel and lightweight RFID authentication scheme with cloud for e-healthcare applications. We use an enhanced formal security model to prove the security of our scheme. In this model the channel between the server and the reader is considered to be insecure and informal analysis is used to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Through the formal and informal analysis, our scheme not only resists the common attacks, but also keeps mutual authentication, information integrity, forward untraceability and backward untraceability. Moreover, both the tag and the reader can reach the anonymity. Our scheme is only hash-based and suitable to realize various security requirements. Compared to recent schemes of the same sort, it is more applicable in e-healthcare.