Low-cost RFID Tags Research Articles

Ultra-Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol to Prevent Replay Attacks for Low-Cost RFID Tags

Ultra-Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol to Prevent Replay Attacks for Low-Cost RFID Tags

RF-Mic

Eavesdropping on human voice is one of the most common but harmful threats to personal privacy. Glasses are in direct contact with human face, which could sense facial motions when users speak, so human speech contents could be inferred by sensing the movements of glasses. In this paper, we present a live voice eavesdropping method, RF-Mic, which utilizes common glasses attached with a low-cost RFID tag to sense subtle facial speech dynamics for inferring possible voice contents. When a user with a glasses, which is attached an RFID tag on the glass bridge, is speaking, RF-Mic first collects RF signals through forward propagation and backscattering. Then, body motion interference is eliminated from the collected RF signals through a proposed Conditional Denoising AutoEncoder (CDAE) network. Next, RF-Mic extracts three kinds of facial speech dynamic features (i.e., facial movements, bone-borne vibrations, and airborne vibrations) by designing three different deep-learning models. Based on the extracted features, a facial speech dynamics model is constructed for live voice eavesdropping. Extensive experiments in different real environments demonstrate that RF-Mic can achieve robust and accurate human live voice eavesdropping.

Smart Shopping Trolley and Notification System Based on IoT

Abstract: In a grocery store, for example, a smart shopping system may connect all of the items. Low-cost RFID tags may be added to each item in an IoT system, which may be read by a smart shopping cart's RFID reader when the item is put in the cart. To avoid lengthy lines at the register, clients may now pay for their purchases using their smartphones. This system may also be coupled with RFID scanners, which enable it to maintain track of inventory and, if required, communicate stock changes to a central server. Additionally, inventory management is simplified thanks to the use of RFID readers instead of laborers who must manually scan every item in the system. Design criteria, a prototype system, and a secure communication protocol are some of the methods used in this study to prove the system's viability in the real world. We believe this is the first time that a smart shopping system with security in mind has been offered.

Security of an RFID Based Authentication Protocol with Bitwise Operations for Supply Chain

Due to the stringent computational capabilities of low-cost RFID tags, several lightweight secure authentication protocols have been proposed for an RFID-based supply chain using bitwise operations. In this paper, we study the vulnerabilities associated with bitwise operations by doing cryptanalysis of a secure lightweight authentication protocol for RFID tags. The bitwise operations like rotation and XOR show that the protocol is vulnerable to tag, reader, and supply chain node impersonation attacks. We find that the major cause of the vulnerability is bitwise operations and suggest using the physically unclonable functions rather than bitwise operations to secure such lightweight protocols. We provide formal analysis using AVISPA tool and show that protocol is vulnerable to various attacks.

A Flexible and Low-Cost UHF RFID Tag Antenna for Blood Bag Traceability

A new low-profile flexible RFID tag antenna operating in the ultra-high frequency (UHF) European band (865 MHz–868 MHz) is proposed for blood bag traceability. Its structure combines inductive and capacitive parts with nested slots allowing for the achieving of conjugate impedance matching with the IC-chip. The whole electrical parameters of the environment (substrate, bag, and blood) were considered for the design of the tag antenna. A good agreement was obtained between the measurements and electromagnetic simulations for the input impedance of the tag antenna in the UHF band. A reading range close to 2.5 m was experimentally obtained. Therefore, this tag antenna could be effective and useful in future RFID systems for blood bag monitoring, thus improving patient safety in healthcare infrastructures.

Height Estimation at Entrance With Passive RFIDs: Possibility, Design and Implementation

The height of an entrant is a critical parameter for many practical applications, e.g., the electrical controlling in smart homes and personalized recommendation in smart clothing stores. This paper explores the possibility, design and implementation of estimating the entrant’s height with low-cost passive RFID tags deployed in the entrance zone (e.g. the doorway). Taking the signal RSSI measurements as the input, we first identify the signal frames influenced by entrant’s passing through, and then convert the identified frames into a strength image, so that the his/her height can be estimated using a simple yet effective image analysis algorithm. We implement a prototype system of RFH with COTS RFID devices, and conduct extensive experiments to validate our design. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is able to achieve more than 80% acceptable accuracy in various scenarios with different parameter settings.

SitR: Sitting Posture Recognition Using RF Signals

Sitting posture has a close relationship with our health, and keeping a healthy sitting posture is critical to each of us. Poor sitting postures often inevitably increase the risk of modern health musculoskeletal disorders. Previous works either used a camera to record the image or attached wearable sensors on the human body to recognize sitting postures. However, video-based approaches may face privacy issues while the wearable sensor-based approaches may cause uncomfortable to the user. In this work, we propose SitR, the first sitting posture recognition system using RF signals alone, which neither compromises the privacy nor requires wearing various sensors on the human body. We demonstrate that SitR can successfully recognize seven habitual sitting postures with just three lightweight and low-cost RFID tags pasted to the user's back. Our design exploits the correlation between the phase change of RFID tags and the sitting postures. By extracting effective features of the measured phase sequences and employing appropriate machine learning algorithm, SitR can achieve robust and high performance. We evaluate the performance of SitR with ten volunteers in two different scenarios. Extensive experiments show SitR can recognize seven sitting postures with a high accuracy across different scenarios and various conditions. SitR can further detect the abnormal respiration, stand up, and sit down and provide sitting posture history for sedentary people.

Enabling Suspended Sediment Concentration Detection With Passive RFID Tags

Suspended sediment concentration detection is a critical task for many practical applications. Traditional schemes suffer from complex operation, poor real-time performance and high cost. This paper explores the possibility of detecting sediment concentration in water with low-cost passive RFID tags. We propose a simple yet effective signal model, in which the received signal is separated into static and dynamic components. We establish the relationship between measured signal changes and sediment concentration via polynomial fitting in offline step. Therefore, the sediment concentration can be accurately detected with a simple mapping operation in the following online step. We implement a prototype system with COTS RFID devices, and extensive experiments are conducted to validate our design. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is able to achieve more than 95% accuracy for sediment concentration detection in water.

ER-Rhythm

The locomotor-respiratory coupling (LRC) ratio of a person doing exercise is an important parameter to reflect the exercise safety and effectiveness. Existing approaches that can measure LRC either rely on specialized and costly devices or use heavy sensors, bringing much inconvenience to people during exercise. To overcome these limitations, we propose ER-Rhythm using low-cost and lightweight RFID tags attached on the human body to simultaneously extract and couple the exercise and respiration rhythm for LRC estimation. ER-Rhythm captures exercise locomotion rhythm from the signals of the tags on limbs. However, extracting respiration rhythm from the signals of the tags on the chest during exercise is a challenging task because the minute respiration movement can be overwhelmed by the large torso movement. To address this challenge, we first leverage the unique characteristic of human respiratory mechanism to measure the chest movement while breathing, and then perform dedicated signal fusion of multiple tags interrogated by a pair of antennas to remove the torso movement effect. In addition, we take advantage of the multi-path effect of RF signals to reduce the number of needed antennas for respiration pattern extraction to save the system cost. To couple the exercise and respiration rhythm, we adopt a correlation-based approach to facilitate LRC estimation. The experimental results show that LRC can be estimated accurately up to 92% -- 95% of the time.

A Sequential RFID System for Robust Communication with Underground Carbon Steel Pipes in Oil and Gas Applications

The world’s oil and gas is transported using a network of steel pipelines most of which lie underground. The length of this network in the US/Canada alone is 3.5 million kilometers. Keeping track of pipes in such a network for pipeline-health monitoring, maintenance, and logistics is an acute problem faced by pipeline-operators. Recently, radio-frequency-identification tags (RFIDs) have been proposed for tracking pipelines and even for monitoring pipeline health with additional built-in sensors. Low-cost RFID tags are wirelessly powered and battery-less. However, RFIDs do not function optimally in the presence of magnetic carbon steel pipes that are prevalent in the industry. High-frequency wireless signals also attenuate rapidly through wet soils. In this research, the use of passive RFID sensor platforms for interrogating buried pipes up to 1.25 m deep in the LF bands is proposed. Using magnetic-induction-based communication, a test-comparison between conventional full/half duplex (FDX/HDX) and sequential (SEQ) RFID schemes is detailed. Wireless measurements in the presence of an industry-standard ASTM A-53 carbon-steel pipe show a SEQ RFID offering better immunity against magnetic proximity effects of the pipe’s wall with an 8.3 dB (x6.8) improvement over a FDX/HDX RFID operating under similar conditions over a distance of 80–125 cm at which pipes are typically buried.

Beyond Respiration

Sleep sound-activities including snore, cough and somniloquy are closely related to sleep quality, sleep disorder and even illnesses. To obtain the information of these activities, current solutions either require the user to wear various sensors/devices, or use the camera/microphone to record the image/sound data. However, many people are reluctant to wear sensors/devices during sleep. The video-based and audio-based approaches raise privacy concerns. In this work, we propose a novel system TagSleep to address the issues mentioned above. For the first time, we propose the concept of two-layer sensing. We employ the respiration sensing information as the basic first-layer information, which is applied to further obtain rich second-layer sensing information including snore, cough and somniloquy. Specifically, without attaching any device to the human body, by just deploying low-cost and flexible RFID tags near to the user, we can accurately obtain the respiration information. What's more interesting, the user's cough, snore and somniloquy all affect his/her respiration, so the fine-grained respiration changes can be used to infer these sleep sound-activities without recording the sound data. We design and implement our system with just three RFID tags and one RFID reader. We evaluate the performance of TagSleep with 30 users (13 males and 17 females) for a period of 2 months. TagSleep is able to achieve higher than 96.58% sensing accuracy in recognizing snore, cough and somniloquy under various sleep postures. TagSleep also boosts the sleep posture recognition accuracy to 98.94%.

Ultralightweight RFID Authentication Protocols for Low-Cost Passive RFID Tags

The field of pervasive computing especially the Internet of Things (IoT) network is evolving due to high network speed and increased capacity offered by the 5G communication system. The IoT network identifies each device before giving it access to the network. The RFID system is one of the most prominent enabling technologies for the node identification. Since the communication between the node and the network takes place over an insecure wireless channel, an authentication mechanism is required to avoid the malicious devices from entering the network. This paper presents a brief survey on the authentication protocols along with the prominent cryptanalysis models for the EPC C1G2 RFID systems. A comparative analysis is provided to highlight the common weaknesses of the existing authentication algorithms and to emphasize on the lack of security standardization for the resource constraint IoT network perception layer. This paper is concluded by proposing an ultralightweight protocol that provides Extremely Good Privacy (EGP). The proposed EGP protocol avoids all the pitfalls highlighted by the cryptanalysis of the existing authentication protocols. The incorporation of the novel ultralightweight primitives, Per-XOR (Px) and Inverse Per-XOR (Px-1), makes the protocol messages more robust and irreversible for all types of adversaries. A comprehensive security analysis illustrates that the proposed protocol proves to be highly resistive against all possible attack scenarios and ensures the security optimally.

Oxide TFT Rectifiers on Flexible Substrates Operating at NFC Frequency Range

This paper presents the experimental characterization of different rectifier circuits using indium–gallium–zinc-oxide thin-film transistor technologies either at NFC or a high frequency range (13.56 MHz) of RFID. These circuits include a single ended rectifier, its differential counterpart, a bridge rectifier, and a cross-coupled full wave rectifier. Diodes were implemented with transistors using conventional processing steps, without requiring short channel devices ( $L =15\,\,\mu \text{m}$ ). Hence, there is no need for either extra masks or processing steps unlike the Schottky diode-based implementation. These circuits were fabricated on a PEN substrate with an annealing temperature not exceeding 180 °C. This paper finds a direct application in flexible low-cost RFID tags since they enable integration of the required electronics to implement tags with the same fabrication steps.

Are RNGs Achilles’ Heel of RFID Security and Privacy Protocols?

Security and privacy concerns have been growing with the increased utilisation of RFID technology in our daily lives. To mitigate these issues, numerous privacy-friendly authentication protocols have been published in the last decade. Random number generators (RNGs) are necessarily used in RFID tags to provide security and privacy. However, low-end RNGs can be the weakest point in a protocol scheme and using them might undesirably cause severe security and privacy problems. On the other hand, having a secure RNG with large entropy might be a trade-off between security and cost for low-cost RFID tags. Furthermore, RNGs used in low-cost RFID tags might not work properly in time. Therefore, we claim that the vulnerability of using an RNG deeply influences the security and privacy level of the RFID system. To the best of our knowledge, this concern has not been considered in the RFID literature. Motivated by this need, in this study, we first revisit Vaudenay’s privacy model which combines the early models and presents a new mature privacy model with different adversary classes. Then, we extend the model by introducing RANDOMEYE privacy, which allows analyzing the security of RNGs in RFID protocols. We further apply our extended model to two existing RFID schemes.

An improved low-cost yoking proof protocol based on Kazahaya’s flaws

Peris-Lopez et al. (J Netw Comput Appl 34:833–845, 2011) recently provided some guidelines that should be followed to design a secure yoking proof protocol. In addition, conforming to those guidelines and EPC C1-G2, they presented a yoking proof for medical systems based on low-cost RFID tags, named Kazahaya. In this paper, we compromise its security and show how a passive adversary can retrieve secret parameters of a patient’s tag in cost of $$O(2^{16})$$ off-line PRNG evaluations. Nevertheless, to show other weaknesses of the protocol and rule out any possible improvement by increasing the length of the used PRNG, we present a forgery attack that proves that a generated proof at time $$t_n$$ can be used to forge a valid proof for any desired time $$t_j$$ . The success probability of this attack is ‘1’ and the complexity is negligible. In addition, we present a new lightweight protocol based on 128-bit PRNG function to solve the problems of Kazahaya protocol. In terms of security, we evaluate the new protocol based on formal and informal methods and prove that the improved protocol is not vulnerable to RFID attacks.

Low Cost RFID Security Protocol Based on Rabin Symmetric Encryption Algorithm

Research shows that heavy-weighted RFID authentication protocol is weak to adapt to low-cost RFID tags because of the usage of public key Encryption Algorithm. The lightweight authentication protocol is suitable for low-cost RFID security authentication protocol because it adopts only the operation of AND, OR, XOR and shift, etc., but is hard to resist complex attacks. In this article, we use the features of the Rabin public key cryptography algorithm, which verifies that the signature process requires only low-cost square multiplication and modulo operations. Based on this, an RFID security authentication protocol with Rabin encryption algorithm is designed. The protocol improves the security of low-cost RFID tags to the height of the public key cryptosystem, and greatly increasing the security of low-cost RFID.

Compact RFID Enabled Moisture Sensor

This research proposes a novel, low-cost RFID tag sensor antenna implemented using commercially available Kodak photo-paper. The aim of this paper is to investigate the possibility of stable, RFID ...

Subtle Flaws in the Secure RFID Tag Searching Protocol: SRTS

Secure RFID searching emerged as a new application field in RFID systems finds out whether a specific RFID tag is nearby within a group of tags in a secure manner. Although numerous RFID authentication protocols have been proposed in different studies, RFID searching has not drawn much attention from the RFID community. Also, most of the existing RFID searching protocols do not comply with the EPC Class-1 Gen2 standard, because their designs employ hardware complex cryptographic primitives such as hash functions or complicated encryption schemes. Recently, Sundaresan et al. has introduced an ultra-lightweight secure RFID searching protocol which only requires a Pseudo Random Number Generator and XOR encryption, i.e. it can be implemented on low-cost EPC Class-1 Gen2 compliant RFID tags. The authors present a detailed security analysis of their protocol to prove its security correctness and they claim that the protocol fulfills the security and privacy requirements. In this study, however, we describe tracking, replay and tag impersonation attacks that show the protocol fails to bear out some of its privacy and security objectives.

The Vulnerability Analysis of Some Typical Hash-Based RFID Authentication Protocols

The low-cost RFID tags have very limited computing and storage resources and this makes it difficult to completely solve their security and privacy problems. Lightweight authentication is considered as one of the most effective methods to ensure the security in the RFID system. Many light-weight authentication protocols use Hash function and pseudorandom generator to ensure the anonymity and confidential communication of the RFID system. But these protocols do not provide such security as they claimed. By analyzing some typical Hash-based RFID authentication protocols, it is found that they are vulnerable to some common attacks. Many protocols cannot resist tracing attack and de-synchronization attack. Some protocols cannot provide forward security. Gy?z? Godor and Sandor Imre proposed a Hash-based authentication protocol and they claimed their protocol could resist the well-known attacks. But by constructing some different attack scenarios, their protocol is shown to be vulnerable to tracing attack and de-synchronization attack. Based on the analysis for the Hash-based authentication protocols, some feasible suggestions are proposed to improve the security of the RFID authentication protocols.

An Ultra-light PRNG Passing Strict Randomness Tests and Suitable for Low Cost Tags

A pseudo-random number generator for low-cost RFID tags is presented. The scheme is simple, sequential and secure, yet has a high performance. Despite its lowest hardware complexity, o ...