Radio Frequency Identification

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has become a ubiquitous identification system used to provide positive identification for items as diverse as cheese and pets. Research into RFID technologies continues and the security of RFID tags is being increasingly questioned. The papers presented here start with countermeasures and proceed to area coverage, mobility, reliability, antennas, and tag localization.

• Guizani, Sghaier, "Security Applications Challenges Of RFID Technology And Possible Countermeasures," Computing, Management and Telecommunications (ComManTel), 2014 International Conference on , vol., no., pp.291,297, 27-29 April 2014. (ID#:14-1757) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6825620&isnumber=6825559 Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a technique for speedy and proficient identification system, it has been around for more than 50 years and was initially developed for improving warfare machinery. RFID technology bridges two technologies in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), namely Product Code (PC) technology and Wireless technology. This broad-based rapidly expanding technology impacts business, environment and society. The operating principle of an RFID system is as follows. The reader starts a communication process by radiating an electromagnetic wave. This wave will be intercepted by the antenna of the RFID tag, placed on the item to be identified. An induced current will be created at the tag and will activate the integrated circuit, enabling it to send back a wave to the reader. The reader redirects information to the host where it will be processed. RFID is used for wide range of applications in almost every field (Health, education, industry, security, management ...). In this review paper, we will focus on agricultural and environmental applications. Keywords: Antennas; Communication channels; ISO standards; Integrated circuits; Radiofrequency identification; Security; Intelligent systems; Management; Product Code; RFID

• Pascal Urien, Selwyn Piramuthu, "Elliptic Curve-Based RFID/NFC Authentication With Temperature Sensor Input For Relay Attacks," Decision Support Systems, Volume 59, March, 2014, (Pages 28-36). (ID#:14-1758) Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2592306.2592498&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=507431191&CFTOKEN=68808106 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2013.10.003 Unless specifically designed for its prevention, none of the existing RFID authentication protocols are immune to relay attacks. Relay attacks generally involve the presence of one or more adversaries who transfer unmodified messages between a prover and a verifier. Given that the message content is not modified, it is rather difficult to address relay attacks through cryptographic means. Extant attempts to prevent relay attacks involve measuring signal strength, round-trip distance, and ambient conditions in the vicinity of prover and verifier. While a majority of related authentication protocols are based on measuring the round-trip distance between prover and verifier using several single-bit challenge-response pairs, recent discussions include physical proximity verification using ambient conditions to address relay attacks. We provide an overview of existing literature on addressing relay attacks through ambient condition measurements. We then propose an elliptic curve-based mutual authentication protocol that addresses relay attacks based on (a) the surface temperature of the prover as measured by prover and verifier and (b) measured single-bit round-trip times between prover and verifier. We also evaluate the security properties of the proposed authentication protocol. Keywords: Distance bounding protocol, Mutual authentication, RFID, Relay attack

• Sangyup Lee; Choong-Yong Lee; Wonse Jo; Dong-Han Kim, "An Efficient Area Coverage Algorithm Using Passive RFID System," Sensors Applications Symposium (SAS), 2014 IEEE , vol., no., pp.366,371, 18-20 Feb. 2014. (ID#:14-1759) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6798977&isnumber=6798900 This paper proposes an efficient area coverage algorithm for multi-agent robotic systems in the smart floor environment consists of passive RFID system. The passive RFID system used in this research allows to store and read information on an RFID tag, which should be located within the detection range of RF antenna. The location information is explicitly stored in the RFID tag, where the smart floor environment is constructed by laying RFID tags on the floor. Mobile robot equipped with an antenna receives the location information in the RFID tag. Based on this information, the position of mobile robot can be estimated and at the same time, the efficiency of area scanning process can be improved compared to other methods because it provides a scanning trace for other mobile robots. This paper proposes an efficient area coverage algorithm for multi-agent mobile robotic systems using the smart floor environment. Keywords: microwave antennas; mobile robots; multi-agent systems; path planning; radiofrequency identification; radio navigation; RF antenna detection range; RFID tag; area scanning process; efficient area coverage algorithm; location information; multiagent mobile robotic system; passive RFID system; scanning trace; smart floor environment; Algorithm design and analysis; Floors; Mobile robots; Passive RFID tags; Radio frequency; Robot kinematics; Passive RFID system; RFID; area coverage; localization; smart floor

• Zhu, W.; Cao, J.; Chan, H.C.B.; Liu, X.; Raychoudhury, V., "Mobile RFID with a High Identification Rate," Computers, IEEE Transactions on , vol.63, no.7, pp.1778,1792, July 2014. (ID#:14-1760) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6470601&isnumber=6840867 An important category of mobile RFID systems is the RFID system with mobile RFID tags. The mobility of RFID tags poses new challenges to designing RFID anti-collision protocols. Existing RFID anti-collision protocols cannot support high tag moving speed and high identification rate simultaneously. These protocols do not distinguish the identification deadlines of moving tags. Also, when tags move fast, they cannot determine the number of unidentified tags in the interrogation area of an RFID reader. In this paper, we propose a schedule-based RFID anti-collision protocol which, given a high identification rate, achieves the maximal tag moving speed. The protocol, without the need to estimate the number of unidentified tags, schedules an optimal number of tags to compete for the channel according to their identification deadlines, so as to achieve the optimal identification performance. The simulation and experiment results show that our approach can increase the moving speed of tags significantly compared with existing approaches, while achieving a high identification rate. Keywords: Belts; Equations; Mobile communication; Protocols; RFID tags; Throughput; Mobile RFID; anti-collision protocol; high identification rate

• Sabesan, S.; Crisp, M.J.; Penty, R.V.; White, I.H., "Wide Area Passive UHF RFID System Using Antenna Diversity Combined With Phase and Frequency Hopping," Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on , vol.62, no.2, pp.878,888, Feb. 2014. (ID#:14-1761) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6657729&isnumber=6729042 This paper presents a long range and effectively error-free ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) interrogation system. The system is based on a novel technique whereby two or more spatially separated transmit and receive antennas are used to enable greatly enhanced tag detection performance over longer distances using antenna diversity combined with frequency and phase hopping. The novel technique is first theoretically modelled using a Rician fading channel. It is shown that conventional RFID systems suffer from multi-path fading resulting in nulls in radio environments. We, for the first time, demonstrate that the nulls can be moved around by varying the phase and frequency of the interrogation signals in a multi-antenna system. As a result, much enhanced coverage can be achieved. A prototype RFID system is built based on an Impinj R2000 transceiver. The demonstrator system shows that the new approach improves the tag detection accuracy from to 100% over a 20 m x15 m area, compared with a conventional switched multi-antenna RFID system. Keywords: Rician channels; UHF antennas; antenna arrays; diversity reception; radio transceivers; radiofrequency identification; receiving antennas; transmitting antennas; Impinj R2000 transceiver; Rician fading channel; UHF RFID interrogation system; antenna diversity; error-free ultra high frequency radio frequency identification; frequency hopping; interrogation signals; multiantenna system; multipath fading; phase hopping; prototype RFID system; radio environments; receive antennas; switched multiantenna RFID system; tag detection accuracy; transmit antennas; wide area passive UHF RFID system; Fading; Passive RFID tags; Radio frequency; Rician channels; Transmitting antennas; Detection accuracy; distributed antenna system (DAS);frequency hopping; nulls; passive radio frequency identification (RFID);phase hopping; read range; returned signal strength indicator (RSSI)

• Goller, Michael; Feichtenhofer, Christoph; Pinz, Axel, "Fusing RFID and Computer Vision For Probabilistic Tag Localization," RFID (IEEE RFID), 2014 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.89,96, 8-10 April 2014. (ID#:14-1762) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6810717&isnumber=6810700 The combination of RFID and computer vision systems is an effective approach to mitigate the limited tag localization capabilities of current RFID deployments. In this paper, we present a hybrid RFID and computer vision system for localization and tracking of RFID tags. The proposed system combines the information from the two complementary sensor modalities in a probabilistic manner and provides a high degree of flexibility. In addition, we introduce a robust data association method which is crucial for the application in practical scenarios. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed system, we conduct a series of experiments in an article surveillance setup. This is a frequent application for RFID systems in retail where previous approaches solely based on RFID localization have difficulties due to false alarms triggered by stationary tags. Our evaluation shows that the fusion of RFID and computer vision provides robustness to false positive observations and allows for a reliable system operation. Keywords: Antenna measurements; Antenna radiation patterns; Cameras; Radiofrequency identification; Robustness; Trajectory

• Morgado, T.A.; Alves, J.M.; Marcos, J.S.; Maslovski, S.I.; Costa, J.R.; Fernandes, C.A.; Silveirinha, M.G., "Spatially Confined UHF RFID Detection With a Metamaterial Grid," Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on , vol.62, no.1, pp.378,384, Jan. 2014. (ID#:14-1763) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6645379&isnumber=6701163 The confinement of the detection region is one of the most challenging issues in Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. Here, we propose a new paradigm to confine the interrogation zone of standard UHF RFID systems. Our approach relies on the use of an all-planar metamaterial wire grid to block the radiation field (i.e., the far-field) of the reader antenna, and thereby obtain a spatially well-confined detection region in the near-field. This solution is analytically and numerically investigated, and then experimentally verified through near-field and tag-reading measurements, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness under external perturbations. Keywords: UHF antennas; antenna radiation patterns; metamaterial antennas; radiofrequency identification; all-planar metamaterial wire grid; detection region confinement; interrogation zone; metamaterial grid; near-field measurement; radiation field; reader antenna ;spatially well-confined detection region; spatially-confined UHF RFID detection; standard UHF RFID systems;tag-reading measurement; ultrahigh-frequency radiofrequency identification systems; Dipole antennas; Metamaterials; Probes; RFID tags; Wires; Metamaterials; near-field UHF RFID; radio frequency identification (RFID); wire media

• Cook, B.S.; Vyas, R.; Kim, S.; Thai, T.; Le, T.; Traille, A.; Aubert, H.; Tentzeris, M.M., "RFID-Based Sensors for Zero-Power Autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks," Sensors Journal, IEEE , vol.14, no.8, pp.2419,2431, Aug. 2014. (ID#:14-1764) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6701187&isnumber=6841675 Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has enabled a new class of low cost, wireless zero-power sensors, which open up applications in highly pervasive and distributed RFID-enabled sensing, which were previously not feasible with wired or battery powered wireless sensor nodes. This paper provides a review of RFID sensing techniques utilizing chip-based and chipless RFID principles, and presents a variety of implementations of RFID-based sensors, which can be used to detect strain, temperature, water quality, touch, and gas. Keywords: Antennas; Backscatter; Radiofrequency identification; Temperature sensors; Topology; Wireless sensor networks; RFID; Wireless sensors; inkjet printing; mm-wave

• Vahedi, E.; Ward, R.K.; Blake, I.F., "Performance Analysis of RFID Protocols: CDMA Versus the Standard EPC Gen-2," Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1,12, January 2014. (ID#:14-1765) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6716098&isnumber=4358066 Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a ubiquitous wireless technology which allows objects to be identified automatically. An RFID tag is a small electronic device with an antenna and has a unique identification (ID) number. RFID tags can be categorized into passive and active tags. For passive tags, a standard communication protocol known as EPC-global Generation-2, or briefly EPC Gen-2, is currently in use. RFID systems are prone to transmission collisions due to the shared nature of the wireless channel used by tags. The EPC Gen-2 standard recommends using dynamic framed slotted ALOHA technique to solve the collision issue and to read the tag IDs successfully. Recently, some researchers have suggested to replace the dynamic framed slotted ALOHA technique used in the standard EPC Gen-2 protocol with the code division multiple access (CDMA) technique to reduce the number of collisions and to improve the tag identification procedure. In this paper, the standard EPC Gen-2 protocol and the CDMA-based tag identification schemes are modeled as absorbing Markov chain systems. Using the proposed Markov chain systems, the analytical formulae for the average number of queries and the total number of transmitted bits needed to identify all tags in an RFID system are derived for both the EPC Gen-2 protocol and the CDMA-based tag identification schemes. In the next step, the performance of the EPC Gen-2 protocol is compared with the CDMA-based tag identification schemes and it is shown that the standard EPC Gen-2 protocol outperforms the CDMA-based tag identification schemes in terms of the number of transmitted bits and the average time required to identify all tags in the system. Keywords: Code division multiple access (CDMA); EPC Gen-2; Markov model; framed ALOHA; radio frequency identification (RFID); tag singulation

• Chen, L.; Demirkol, I.; Heinzelman, W., "Token-MAC: A Fair MAC Protocol for Passive RFID Systems," Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on , vol.13, no.6, pp.1352,1365, June 2014. (ID#:14-1766) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6629988&isnumber=6824285 Passive RFID systems used for inventory management and asset tracking typically utilize contention-based MAC protocols, such as the standard C1G2 protocol. Although the C1G2 protocol has the advantage that it is easy to implement, it suffers from unfairness and relatively low throughput when the number of tags in the network increases. This paper proposes a token-based MAC protocol called Token-MAC for passive RFID systems, which aims a) to provide a fair chance for tags in the network to access the medium without requiring synchronization of the tags, b) to increase the overall throughput, i.e., the tag rate, and c) to enable a high number of tags to be read under limited tag read time availability, which is an especially important challenge for mobile applications. We implement Token-MAC as well as C1G2 and a TDMA-based protocol using Intel WISP passive RFID tags and perform experiments. Additionally, based on our experimental results, we develop energy harvesting and communication models for tags that we then use in simulations of the three protocols. Our experimental and simulation results all show that Token-MAC can achieve a higher tag rate and better fairness than C1G2, and it can provide better performance over a longer range compared with the TDMA-based protocol. It is also shown that Token-MAC achieves much lower tag detection delay, especially for high numbers of tags. Token-MAC is, therefore, a promising solution for passive RFID systems. Keywords: Media Access Protocol; Mobile computing; Passive RFID tags; Thigh; Time division multiple access;C1G2 protocol; Data communications; General; MAC protocol; Passive RFID

• Measel, Ryan; Lester, Christopher S.; Xu, Yifei; Primerano, Richard; Kam, Moshe, "Detection Performance Of Spread Spectrum Signatures For Passive, Chipless RFID," RFID (IEEE RFID), 2014 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.55,59, 8-10 April 2014. (ID#:14-1767) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6810712&isnumber=6810700 Time-Domain Reflectometry (TDR) RFID tags are passive, chipless tags that use discontinuities along a transmission line to create reflections. The discontinuities may be designed to produce a bipodal signal encoded with the unique identifier of the tag. When multiple tags are co-located and interrogated simultaneously, multiple access interference degrades the ability of the reader to detect the tags accurately. Reader detection can be improved by using spread spectrum signatures as the unique identifiers to limit interference. This work evaluates the ability of Gold codes and Kasami-Large codes to improve detection performance of a passive, chipless TDR RFID system. Simulations were conducted for varying numbers of simultaneously interrogated tags using synthetic tag responses constructed from the measured waveform of a prototype TDR tag. Results indicate that the Gold Code signature set outperforms the Kasami-Large Code signature set and a random, naive set for simultaneous interrogation of less than 15 tags. For larger numbers of simultaneous tags, a random set performs nearly as well as the Kasami-Large Code set and provides more useful signatures. Keywords: Correlation; Gold; Impedance; Interference; Passive RFID tags; Prototypes

• Baloch, Fariha; Pendse, Ravi, "A New Anti-Collision Protocol For RFID Networks," Wireless Telecommunications Symposium (WTS), 2014 , vol., no., pp.1,5, 9-11 April 2014. (ID#:14-1768) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6834996&isnumber=6834983 The speed at which RFID tags are read is critical to many RFID applications. Tag collisions can increase the time to gather information from tags in RFID networks. These collisions are unavoidable; however the time spent on them can be reduced using an intelligent medium access protocol. In this paper, the authors present a unique anti-collision protocol that scans for collided and empty slots in an RFID network before querying for tag IDs. The new proposed protocol uses a modified version of the bit scan technique to scan for unsuccessful slots. By identifying these slots using a low overhead scan process, the penalty of collisions and empty slots during the query process is reduced and thus a better end-to-end tag reading time is observed. Keywords: EPC C1G2; Medium Access; Performance; RFID; Scan

• Ben Niu, Xiaoyan Zhu, Haotian Chi, Hui Li, "Privacy and Authentication Protocol for Mobile RFID Systems," Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal, Volume 77 Issue 3, August 2014, (Pages 1713-1731). (ID#:14-1769) Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2013.10.003 Security and privacy issues in RFID technology gain tremendous popularity recently. However, existing work on RFID authentication problems always make assumptions such as (1) hash function can be fully employed in designing RFID protocols; (2) channels between readers and server are always secure. The first assumption is not suitable for EPC Class-1 Gen-2 tags, which has been challenged in many research work, while the second one cannot be directly adopted in mobile RFID applications where wireless channels between readers and server are always insecure. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel ultralightweight and privacy-preserving authentication protocol for mobile RFID systems. We only use bitwise XOR, and several special constructed pseudo-random number generators to achieve our aims in the insecure mobile RFID environment. We use GNY logic to prove the security correctness of our proposed protocol. The security and privacy analysis show that our protocol can provide several privacy properties and avoid suffering from a number of attacks, including tag anonymity, tag location privacy, reader privacy, forward secrecy, and mutual authentication, replay attack, desynchronization attack etc. We implement our protocol and compare several parameters with existing work, the evaluation results indicate us that our protocol significantly improves the system performance. Keywords: Authentication, Mobile RFID systems, Privacy-preserving, Ultralightweight

• Farzana Rahman, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, "Efficient Detection Of Counterfeit Products In Large-Scale RFID Systems Using Batch Authentication Protocols," Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Volume 18 Issue 1, January 2014, (Pages 177-188). (ID#:14-1770) Available at:http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2581638.2581671&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=507431191&CFTOKEN=68808106 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0629-8 RFID technology facilitates processing of product information, making it a promising technology for anti-counterfeiting. However, in large-scale RFID applications, such as supply chain, retail industry, pharmaceutical industry, total tag estimation and tag authentication are two major research issues. Though there are per-tag authentication protocols and probabilistic approaches for total tag estimation in RFID systems, the RFID authentication protocols are mainly per-tag-based where the reader authenticates one tag at each time. For a batch of tags, current RFID systems have to identify them and then authenticate each tag sequentially, one at a time. This increases the protocol execution time due to the large volume of authentication data. In this paper, we propose to detect counterfeit tags in large-scale system using efficient batch authentication protocol. We propose FSA-based protocol, FTest, to meet the requirements of prompt and reliable batch authentication in large-scale RFID applications. FTest can determine the validity of a batch of tags with minimal execution time which is a major goal of large-scale RFID systems. FTest can reduce protocol execution time by ensuring that the percentage of potential counterfeit products is under the user-defined threshold. The experimental result demonstrates that FTest performs significantly better than the existing counterfeit detection approaches, for example, existing authentication techniques. Keywords: Anti-counterfeiting, Batch authentication, RFID, Security, Supply chain, Tree-based protocols

• Shuai-Min Chen, Mu-En Wu, Hung-Min Sun, King-Hang Wang, "CRFID: An RFID System With A Cloud Database As A Back-End Server," Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 30, January, 2014, (Pages 155-161). (ID#:14-1771) Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2013.05.004 Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems can benefit from cloud databases since information on thousands of tags is queried at the same time. If all RFID readers in a system query a cloud database, data consistency can easily be maintained by cloud computing. Privacy-preserving authentication (PPA) has been proposed to protect RFID security. The time complexity for searching a cloud database in an RFID system is O(N), which is obviously inefficient. Fortunately, PPA uses tree structures to manage tags, which can reduce the complexity from a linear search to a logarithmic search. Hence, tree-based PPA provides RFID scalability. However, in tree-based mechanisms, compromise of a tag may cause other tags in the system to be vulnerable to tracking attacks. Here we propose a secure and efficient privacy-preserving RFID authentication protocol that uses a cloud database as an RFID server. The proposed protocol not only withstands desynchronizing and tracking attacks, but also provides scalability with O(logN) search complexity. Keywords: Cloud computing, Cryptography, Desynchronizing attack, Privacy, RFID, Remote accessibility, Security, Tracking attack

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