SecuCode: Intrinsic PUF Entangled Secure Wireless Code Dissemination for Computational RFID Devices

The simplicity of deployment and perpetual operation of energy harvesting devices provides a compelling proposition for a new class of edge devices for the Internet of Things. In particular, Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices are an emerging class of battery-free, computational, sensing enhanced devices that harvest all of their energy for operation. Despite wireless connectivity and powering, secure wireless firmware updates remains an open challenge for CRFID devices due to: intermittent powering, limited computational capabilities, and the absence of a supervisory operating system. We present, for the first time, a secure wireless code dissemination (SecuCode) mechanism for CRFIDs by entangling a device intrinsic hardware security primitive Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM PUF) to a firmware update protocol. The design of SecuCode: i) overcomes the resource-constrained and intermittently powered nature of the CRFID devices; ii) is fully compatible with existing communication protocols employed by CRFID devices in particular, ISO-18000-6C protocol; and ii) is built upon a standard and industry compliant firmware compilation and update method realized by extending a recent framework for firmware updates provided by Texas Instruments. We build an end-to-end SecuCode implementation and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate standards compliance, evaluate performance and security.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computin

Multiport sensor RFIDs for wireless passive sensing of objects - Basic theory and early results

A new family of passive sensor radio-frequency identification devices is here proposed for applications in the context of wireless sensor networks. The new tags, working in the ultra-high frequency band, are able to detect the value or the change of some features of the tagged body without using any specific sensor. Such tags are provided with multiple chips embedded either within a cluster of cooperating antennas or in a single multiport antenna, and exploit the natural mismatch of the antenna input impedance caused by the change of the tagged object. A basic theory of multiport sensor tags is formulated with the purpose to describe the possible classification and detection performances in a unitary context. Some numerical examples and a first experiment corroborate the feasibility of the idea

MOBILE NETWORKING FOR “SMART DUST” WITH RFID SENSOR NETWORKS

Large-scale networks of wireless sensors are becoming an active topic of research.. We review the key elements of the emergent technology of “Smart Dust” and outline the research challenges they present to the mobile networking and systems community, which must provide coherent connectivity to large numbers of mobile network nodes co-located within a small volume. Smart Dust sensor networks – consisting of cubic millimetre scale sensor nodes capable of limited computation, sensing, and passive optical communication with a base station – are envisioned to fulfil complex large scale monitoring tasks in a wide variety of application areas. RFID technology can realize “smart-dust” applications for the sensor network community. RFID sensor networks (RSNs), which consist of RFID readers and RFID sensor nodes (WISPs), extend RFID to include sensing and bring the advantages of small, inexpensive and long-lived RFID tags to wireless sensor networks. In many potential Smart Dust applications such as object detection and tracking, fine-grained node localization plays a key role