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As passive tagging technologies like RFID become more economical and ubiquitous, it can be envisioned that in the future, millions of sensors integrated with these tags could become an integral part of the next generation of smart infrastructure and the overall concept of internet-of-things. As a result, securing these passive assets against data theft and counterfeiting would become a priority, reinforcing the importance of the proposed dynamic authentication techniques. This research project investigates dynamic hardware-software authentication techniques on passive RFID sensors and tags based on zero-power timing and synchronization circuits.
This project explores dynamic anti-counterfeiting and hardware assurance techniques based on zero-power timers. The operation of these timers are based on physics of quantum-mechanical tunneling of electron transport through the oxide layer and through synthetically introduced oxide-traps. The hardware-software authentication strategies being explored include: (1) Born-on-Date timing strategy where the response of the timers will be synchronized across different trusted RFID sensors/tags and any deviation from an expected response will be used to isolate counterfeits, (2) Tamper-sensitive timing strategy where the timer are used to detect any snooping or tampering of the trusted RFID sensors/tags, and (3) Dynamic authentication strategy where the timers are used to generate hashing functions that will be difficult to reverse engineer. The project develops a cross-disciplinary educational forum between the electrical engineers and computer scientists in the area of hardware-software trust verification.
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STARSS: Small: Collaborative: Zero-Power Dynamic Signature for Trust Verification of Passive Sensors and Tags