Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which do not have on-tag power sources, have become the standard mechanism for identifying countless objects. Currently, two security-related capabilities are missing from these tags: authentication and transfer-of-ownership. In this project, the PIs propose to re-define the authentication of an RFID tag from being something the tag knows to being something the tag is. In particular, the PIs explore methods to measure the response times of passive RFID tags, which are unique due to manufacturing variances, and use these measured times to uniquely identify (and authenticate) their corresponding tags. (Note that using measured response times is better, in identifying passive RFID tags, than using baseband radio frequency signals because the former does not require high-bandwidth and expensive measuring equipment.) The PIs explore how to augment the functionality of measuring the response times of RFID tags into regular RFID readers. They also develop classification algorithms for comparing the enrolled response times with the observed response times. The PIs also develop privacy-preserving protocols to perform transfer-of-ownership of RFID tags based on the lightweight authentication algorithm described above. The PIs also develop new hardware primitives for transferring ownership of an RFID tag by manipulating the measured response time of the tag in a controlled way such that it is still a function of manufacturing variances.
EAGER: Fingerprinting RFID Tags with Transfer-of-Ownership Capabilities