Security Threat Mitigation Trends in Low-Cost RFID Systems

Abstract

Abstract. The design and implementation of security threat mitigation mechanisms in RFID systems, specially in low-cost RFID tags, are gaining great attention in both industry and academia. One main focus of research interests is the authentication and privacy techniques to prevent attacks targeting the insecure wireless channel of these systems. Cryptography is a key tool to address these threats. Nevertheless, strong hardware constraints, such as production costs, power consumption, time of response, and regulations compliance, makes the use of traditional cryptography in these systems a very challenging problem. The use of low-overhead procedures becomes the main approach to solve these challenging problems where traditional cryptography cannot fit. Recent results and trends, with an emphasis on lightweight techniques for addressing critical threats against low-cost RFID systems, are surveyed.

AFA-RFID: Physical layer authentication for passive RFID tags

“…There are many information security attacks such as cloning, man-in-themiddle and replay attacks to which passive RFID systems are vulnerable [2], especially when placed in a product identification role. With the resource limitations placed on passive RFID tags, there are three major challenges facing the implementation of strong information security to counter these attacks in passive RFID tags today, namely [11], [14] the number of electronic gates required to implement the information security feature, the high monetary cost of these additional electronic gates, and the high cost in terms of power consumption and often performance.…”

Formal Verification of a Key Establishment Protocol for EPC Gen2 RFID Systems: Work in Progress

“…There have recently been many approaches focusing on enhancing the security of the EPC Gen2 technology [10]. Some of these approaches propose physical solutions, including new cryptographic primitives on-board of the tags; others propose straighforward protocols, that remain to be adapted to the Gen2 contsraints.…”

“…Albeit they can perform some basic arithmetic operations, they are characterized with a very minimalist design, specially with regard to the implementation of security functionalities. For this reason, the security of the EPC Gen2 technology is gaining great attention in both industry and academia [9], [10]. One important focus of research is the inclusion of verifiable secure key establishment protocols, to prevent eavesdropping attacks [12].…”

Securing the Communications of Home Health Care Systems Based on RFID Sensor Networks

“…These new solutions deal with security aspects between body sensor and other surveillance components of a home health care system, such as cameras and PDAs. Their complexity costs are, however, too high for the passive RFID components expected in our motivation scenario [20]. We analyze in the sequel some more appropriate protocols to establish keys between resource-constrained devices, while guaranteeing the same security properties.…”

“…Indeed, the implementation of robust hash functions in the constrained environment of low-cost RFID labels (e.g., EPC Gen2 labels [16]) is very challenging and probably unrealistic for our motivation scenario. This condition leads us towards less expensive schemes (in terms of computation costs) based uniquely on the single use of on-tag pseudo-randomness and simple arithmetic operations [20].…”