RFID Security

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RFID Security
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Current Applications

• Logistics
• Military supply logistics
• Gulf War I Double orders to ensure arrival
• Gulf War II RFID makes supply chain reliable
• Proctor Gamble
• Elimination of dock bottleneck fast loading of
  palettes onto trucks
• Inventory control (i.e., theft-prevention)
• Air Canada
• tracking of food carts
• Gillette
• Tracking Mach3 razor blades
• Ordered 3 million
• Refining the retail experience
• Payment technologies
• Exxon/Mobil
• Speedpass

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Future Applications

• Maintaining shelf stocks in retail environments
• Tagging pets
• Proximity badges for building access
• Clothing anti-forgery, customer returns
• Parenting logistics
• Water park uses RFID bracelets to track children
• Smart appliances
• Refrigerators that automatically create shopping
  lists
• Ovens that know how to cook pre-packaged food
• Smart products
• Clothing, appliances, CDs tagged for store
  returns
• Smart paper
• Airline tickets that indicate your location in
  the airport
• Library books
• Business cards
• Recycling
• Plastics that sort themselves

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RFID Viability

• Expensive tags were OK for high tickets
• Price has to go below 0.05
• A recent purchase involved 500 million tags
  purchased by retialer
• Once viable (as predicted) RFID could be the most
  widely deployed chip
• Promise is to replace the 5 billion barcode
  scans/day

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Basic Components

• RFID Tag
• Transponder
• Located on the object to be identified
• RFID Reader
• Transceiver
• Can read and write data to Tag
• Data Processing Subsystem
• Connects to reader

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Security Issues

• Privacy
• Business
• Personal
• Denial of service
• Incorrect information
• Forgeries

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Cost-Security Trade-off

• Low cost
• Low intelligence (up to 5000 gates)
• Low storage (few hundred bits)
• Low range (few meters)
• Security
• AES needs 20-30 thousand gates
• Hash such as SHA-1 also needs similar order
• TEA algorithm still not feasible

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Forward and Backward Channels
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Hash-Based Access Control
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Randomized Access Control
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Anti-Collision Algorithms

• Probabilistic
• Tags respond in randomly generate times
• Slotted Aloha scheme
• Deterministic - Binary tree-walking scheme
• Space of k-bit identifiers
• k-bit identifiers leaves in a tree of depth k
• Reader sorts through tags based on tag-ID
• Traverses tree asking subsets of tags to
  broadcast a single bit at a time.
• RFID reader broadcasts tag serial numbers over
  very large distances
• May introduce vulnerability to eavesdropping.

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Silent Tree Walking
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Other Measures

• Proactive detection of intruders
• Chaffing and Winnowing
• Confidentiality without encryption
• Deliberate DoS for privacy