A Tamper Detection Method for RFID Tag Data

Abstract

Recently, system designers, especially in the field of product life-cycle management system start considering use of user memory bank of UHF RFID tags. By storing most useful life-cycle data onto a tag, user can access to the data even without access to back-end databases. One of the major issues to make use of the user memory bank is detection of memory tampering. Although technology vendors start introducing new functionalities such as fine grained locking along with high capacity user memory, these tags with new functionalities require new non-standardized air protocol to operate -require modified version of reader/writers. Also, these tags are usually more expensive. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to this problem: tag side write journaling mechanism and "Tag Memory Cloaking," which protect the journal by using. Tag Private Memory region, which is only readable and not writable from external devices such as a reader/writer, but writable by tag itself. Also, any write to the user memory automatically add journal entry -offset and length of the write -into the Tag Private Memory region. Later, a user can check existence of overlapped writes to user memory by checking the journal records. Since we have not modified any of air protocol, standard compliant read/writer can fully capable of all of our proposed operations: write to the tag, read, then detect unusual modification to user memory area. We have implemented the functionality to Programmable Battery Assisted Passive tag (BAP), then validated the method with several standard compliant reader/writers.

A PUF-Based Authentication Protocol to Address Ticket-Switching of RFID-Tagged Items

“…Yamamoto et al [27] propose another means to watermark RFID tags. However, Gandino et al [8] observe that this method has several drawbacks including the requirement of large memory, long transmission time for tamper checking, and its limited applicability.…”

Hybrid Approach to Ensure Data Confidentiality and Tampered Data Recovery for RFID Tag

“…On the other hand, watermarking approaches [13,18,19], write activity [15],stenography [11] fall on tamper evident and restoring category. The temper detection and restoring protocols can be further classified as protocols achieving temper detection only such as [12], [13], [14], [15] and protocols achieving both temper detection and recovery such as [11]. This point forward we will only discuss protocols on tamper evidence and restoring categories.…”

“…It also did not consider the risk of tag's serial number tampering. Yamamoto et al, [15] proposed a tamper detection solution based on a technique known as digitally signed journal bit it requires modification in the existing EPC tags specification.…”

“…We have compared our proposed protocol with existing similar protocols [11], [12], [13], [14] and [15]. We have compared on the basis of security protection, compatibility and techniques used.…”

On the security of several Gen2-based protocols without modifying the standards

“…Recently, Park et al (2007), Yamamoto et al (2008), and Choi et al (2009) have proposed improvements to Gen2 authentication security or Gen2 anti-cloning security. They tried to keep the Gen2 air protocols unchanged, because there are many readers/writers deployed in the market.…”