Biblio

We provide the first solution to an important question, "how a physical-layer RFID authentication method can defend against signal replay attacks". It was believed that if the attacker has a device that can replay the exact same reply signal of a legitimate 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.

Concise is a Forwarding information base (FIB) design that uses very little memory to support fast query of a large number of dynamic network names or flow IDs. Concise makes use of minimal perfect hashing and the SDN framework to design and implement the data structure, protocols, and system. Experimental results show that Concise uses significantly smaller memory to achieve faster query speed compared to existing FIB solutions and it can be updated very efficiently.

On battery-free IoT devices such as passive RFID tags, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to run cryptographic algorithms. Hence physical-layer identification methods are proposed to validate the authenticity of passive tags. However no existing physical-layer authentication method of RFID tags that can defend against the signal replay attack. This paper presents Hu-Fu, a new direction and the first solution of physical layer authentication that is resilient to the signal replay attack, based on the fact of inductive coupling of two adjacent tags. We present the theoretical model and system workflow. Experiments based on our implementation using commodity devices show that Hu-Fu is effective for physical-layer authentication.

Modern distributed key-value stores are offering superior performance, incremental scalability, and fine availability for data-intensive computing and cloud-based applications. Among those distributed data stores, the designs that ensure the confidentiality of sensitive data, however, have not been fully explored yet. In this paper, we focus on designing and implementing an encrypted, distributed, and searchable key-value store. It achieves strong protection on data privacy while preserving all the above prominent features of plaintext systems. We first design a secure data partition algorithm that distributes encrypted data evenly across a cluster of nodes. Based on this algorithm, we propose a secure transformation layer that supports multiple data models in a privacy-preserving way, and implement two basic APIs for the proposed encrypted key-value store. To enable secure search queries for secondary attributes of data, we leverage searchable symmetric encryption to design the encrypted secondary indexes which consider security, efficiency, and data locality simultaneously, and further enable secure query processing in parallel. For completeness, we present formal security analysis to demonstrate the strong security strength of the proposed designs. We implement the system prototype and deploy it to a cluster at Microsoft Azure. Comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted in terms of Put/Get throughput, Put/Get latency under different workloads, system scaling cost, and secure query performance. The comparison with Redis shows that our prototype can function in a practical manner.

Smart environments and security systems require automatic detection of human behaviors including approaching to or departing from an object. Existing human motion detection systems usually require human beings to carry special devices, which limits their applications. In this paper, we present a system called APID to detect arm reaching by analyzing backscatter communication signals from a passive RFID tag on the object. APID does not require human beings to carry any device. The idea is based on the influence of human movements to the vibration of backscattered tag signals. APID is compatible with commodity off-the-shelf devices and the EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 protocol. In APID an commercial RFID reader continuously queries tags through emitting RF signals and tags simply respond with their IDs. A USRP monitor passively analyzes the communication signals and reports the approach and departure behaviors. We have implemented the APID system for both single-object and multi-object scenarios in both horizontal and vertical deployment modes. The experimental results show that APID can achieve high detection accuracy.