Low-cost Radio Frequency Identification Research Articles

A Multibranch U-Shaped Tunable Encoding Chipless RFID Strain Sensor for IoT Sensing System

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is essential for modern large buildings and infrastructure. Radio frequency identification (RFID) widen a new paradigm for SHM in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. This article introduces a low-cost intelligent RFID monitoring system for future IoT applications. Through adding a multiparameter sensing strategy to the passive RFID tags that can be deployed on a large scale to form a sensor network, which expands the coverage of IoT in key positions health monitoring of buildings. In this work, a novel chipless RFID strain sensing tag is designed to characterize the magnitude and direction of metal surface strain, and a low-cost detection method suitable for large mechanical structures is proposed. The traditional strain antennas focus on identifying the strain characteristics without the function of encoding, and there are limitations, such as the rigid measurement methods and the expensive measurement instruments. The tag designed in this article integrates both strain sensing and encoding functions, and has the advantages of small size, high data capacity, and information reading is not easily affected by environmental noise. This article proposes an economical and flexible tag spectrum extraction method, which realizes the intelligent collection and transmission of tag data by connecting lightweight vector network analyzer (VNA) with microcontroller. Combined with the IoT, this method can be well applied to the security assessment and damage detection of large infrastructure structures, which provides a new approach to modern building health monitoring applications from integrated tag design to intelligent detection and risk assessment schemes.

RFID Authentication System Based on User Biometric Information

Traditional authentication technologies usually perform identity authentication based on user information verification (e.g., entering the password) or biometric information (e.g., fingerprints). However, there are security risks when applying only these authentication methods. For example, if the password is compromised, it is unlikely to determine whether the user entering the password is legitimate. In this paper, we subdivide biometric information into physiological and behavioral information, and we propose a novel user authentication system, RF-Ubia, which utilizes the low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to capture unique biological or behavioral information rooted in the user and can be used in two schemes for user authentication. Consisting of an array of nine passive tags and a commercial RFID reader, RF-Ubia provides double assurance for security of identity authentication by combining user information and biometric characteristics. It first verifies the user’s password, and then identifies the biometric characteristics of the legitimate user. Due to the coupling effect among tags, any change in tag signal caused by the user’s touch will affect other tag signals at the same time. Since each user has different fingertip impedance, their touch will cause unique tag signal changes. Therefore, by combining biometric information, the tag array will uniquely identify users. The evaluation results show that RF-Ubia achieves excellent authentication performance with an average recognition rate of 93.8%.

A Fully Integrated Low-Cost HF Multistandard RFID Reader SoC and Module for IoT Applications

The deployment and application of large-scale Internet of Things require a large number of 13.56-MHz radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader chips with lower cost. The existing RFID reader module needs to integrate multiple chips, such as microcontroller and high-frequency (HF) RFID reader IC on a single printed circuit board (PCB), which has the bottleneck of cost, power consumption, stability, and reliability. In order to adapt to the development trend of high integration, miniaturization, and low-power consumption of RFID reader, this article proposes a fully integrated low-cost RFID reader System-on-a-Chip (SoC), which integrates RF transceiver and analog circuit, baseband protocol processing, microcontroller, memory, and interface circuit into a single chip. The proposed reader IC supports communication protocols, such as ISO/IEC 14443 Type A and Type B, ISO/IEC 15693, and ISO/IEC 7816. The reader can communicate with contact and contactless IC cards. The modulation depth of the transmitter circuit ranges from 1% to 100%, and the maximum transmitting current is 126 mA. The receiver circuit is composed of I/Q clock generation, switched capacitor sampling circuit, variable gain amplifier (VGA) with filter, comparator, and pulse shaping circuit, which has good anti-noise performance. This 13.56-MHz RFID reader SoC is fabricated in a 180-nm CMOS process and is housed in a 64-pin QFP package. The total area is 8.75 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , including 1.47 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> for analog and RF circuits.

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.

Development of low-cost RFID sensors dedicated to air pollution monitoring for preventive conservation

Monitoring of atmospheric pollutants is a key point for preventive conservation since these species are known to impact the integrity of many artifacts including metals, papers, pigment and textiles. The problem can be amplified in closed environments, like in exhibition rooms and showcases, where temperature and relative humidity gradients and levels can introduce additional micro-climatic problems. One objective of the EU-SensMat project concerns the development of low cost and low visual nuisance sensors sensitive to these pollutants, making them affordable for all museums including small ones. For this purpose, the Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology was considered to produce air-quality sensors based on reactive metallic dosimeter. Besides the low cost, they can be easily integrated to other existing RFID applications such as identification tasks since the interrogation is made with a commercial UHF-RFID reader. The description and the main features of these sensors are discussed in this paper. Moreover, as it will be shown, the subsequent chemical analysis of the sensitive part of the sensors provide useful information to determine the origin of the pollutants.

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.

Design of a Novel Frequency-Coded Chipless RFID Tag

Chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) is a low-cost RFID solution that has the potential to replace traditional barcodes in short-range applications. In this paper, a novel frequency-coded chipless RFID tag is designed at Ku-band (12.4-18 GHz). Compared to previous designs, the proposed tag has a more compact design by multiplexing one tag antenna for both transmitting and receiving purposes. In addition, the tag is designed on a substrate with ground plane, which reduces the undesired effect of the background detuning. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed chipless RFID tag, four 3-bit tags are designed in simulation, with having two of them manufactured and tested. Simulations and measurements are performed for codes of 000 and 111, and the results verify the validity of the proposed design. Finally, the sensitivity of the tag response to fabrication errors and orientation are discussed and demonstrated with simulations.

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).

Survey: Vulnerability Analysis of Low-Cost ECC-Based RFID Protocols against Wireless and Side-Channel Attacks.

The radio frequency identification (RFID) system is one of the most important technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) that tracks single or multiple objects. This technology is extensively used and attracts the attention of many researchers in various fields, including healthcare, supply chains, logistics, asset tracking, and so on. To reach the required security and confidentiality requirements for data transfer, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a powerful solution, which ensures a tag/reader mutual authentication and guarantees data integrity. In this paper, we first review the most relevant ECC-based RFID authentication protocols, focusing on their security analysis and operational performances. We compare the various lightweight ECC primitive implementations designed for RFID applications in terms of occupied area and power consumption. Then, we highlight the security threats that can be encountered considering both network attacks and side-channel attacks and analyze the security effectiveness of RFID authentication protocols against such types of attacks. For this purpose, we classify the different threats that can target an ECC-based RFID system. After that, we present the most promising ECC-based protocols released during 2014–2021 by underlining their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we perform a comparative study between the different protocols mentioned regarding network and side-channel attacks, as well as their implementation costs to find the optimal one to use in future works.

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.

Low-Cost RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Algorithm

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is the fastest growing technology in the world today. Thus, wireless communication between tags and readers became an integral part of retail products, library books, personal identifications, and healthcare. The RFID system can provide security features to the data transferred along the network to maintain data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used in RFID authentication protocols to improve communication security. Zhao proposed an RFID authentication protocol using ECC where a unique access list for tags is generated with the reader identifier to elevate the security level. Although Zhao's protocol can withstand most of the RFID security attacks, it has a very high computation cost. The authors improve Zhao protocol and propose a new RFID authentication protocol by reducing the computation cost almost to the half of that in Zhao. The proposed protocol shows a significant improvement in the computation cost.

Characterization of Shorted Dipole Antennas for Low-Cost RFID Reader Applications

This article presents a comprehensive study on shorted dipole antennas aiming for low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) reader applications. Starting from a low-profile shorted bowtie dipole antenna, it is found that by varying the shorting wall position, three different types of resonant antennas could be realized with different radiation features. A low-profile planar inverted F antenna (PIFA) -type dipole is obtained by moving the shorting wall toward the feeding, which exhibits a low resonance frequency without obvious back lobe radiation or sidelobes. When the shorting wall is placed in the middle of the radiating patch, a mushroom-type dipole antenna can be built. A zeroth-order mode is also observed. This structure differs from the magnetoelectric dipole due to a low-profile structure. Placing the wall toward the end of the dipole arm leads to a loop-type antenna with a broader beam and a reduced gain. It also shifts the resonance toward the higher frequency. Based on the PIFA- and mushroom-type structures, two circularly polarized antennas with crossed shorted dipoles are designed and investigated carefully. Finally, two optimized, compact, and low-cost RFID reader antennas based on simple metal stamping process and screws are designed, fabricated, and tested, showing an excellent RF reading range. This study demonstrates that for the shorted dipole antennas, miniaturization and bandwidth control can be achieved simultaneously. Particularly, for higher gain and smaller size, the shorting wall should be placed close to the feeding to suppress the loop mode. For omnidirectional radiation, the loop mode should be enhanced by moving the shorting wall close to the end of the dipole arm.

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.

Performance, Accuracy and Generalization Capability of RFID Tags' Constellation for Indoor Localization.

Indoor localization has recently witnessed an increase in interest due to its wide range of potential services. Further, the location information is very important in many applications, such as the Internet of Things, logistics, library management and so on. Hence, different technologies and techniques have been proposed in the literature for indoor localization systems. Most of these systems present the disadvantages of a poor performance, low accuracy and high cost. However, thanks to its low cost, high accuracy and non-line-of-sight detection, radio frequency identification (RFID)-based localization has increasingly become the most used technology for indoor localization. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach based on the multiple input single output (MISO) protocol to improve the accuracy of a low-cost RFID localization system. Whereas most traditional systems use a single tag for localization, the proposed architecture encourages the use of a group of RFID tags named as a constellation. According to experimental results and based on the signals’ diversity, the location accuracy is improved to get an estimated position error of 81 cm at the cumulative distribution function of 90%.

Framework for The Development of a Low-Cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Based-System for Supporting Vaccine Immunization and Uptake in a Developing Country

Framework for The Development of a Low-Cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Based-System for Supporting Vaccine Immunization and Uptake in a Developing Country

Secure Outsourcing Algorithms for Composite Modular Exponentiation Based on Single Untrusted Cloud

AbstractModular exponentiation, as a fundamental operation used in many public-key cryptosystems, has always be considered to be very time-consuming. It is difficult for some devices with limited computation capability, such as mobile devices and low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, to perform large-scale modular exponentiations. In cryptosystems, one typical case of modular exponentiation is that the modulus is a composite number. For instance, in RSA algorithm, the modulus is the product of two distinct prime numbers. In this paper, we investigate how to securely and efficiently outsource composite modular exponentiations and put forward two secure outsourcing algorithms for composite modular exponentiations based on single untrusted cloud. The first algorithm, named MCExp, is designed for outsourcing single composite modular exponentiation, i.e. $u^a$ mod $N$. The second algorithm, named SMCExp, is designed for outsourcing simultaneous composite modular exponentiation, i.e. $\prod ^{n}_{i=1}u^{a_i}_{i}$ mod $N$. Different from algorithms based on two untrusted servers, the proposed algorithms are very practical because they avoid the strong assumption that there must exist two servers without collusion. The proposed algorithms not only protect the privacy of the exponent and the base simultaneously, but also enable users to verify the correctness of the result returned by the cloud with high probability. Compared with using the square-and-multiply algorithm, the user can achieve higher efficiency by using the proposed algorithms. Besides, we prove the security of our algorithms and conduct several experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithms can be used to construct the secure outsourcing algorithms for Shamir’s identity-based signature and identity-based multi-signature.

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.