RFID Deployment in INDIAN RAILWAYS: A case study of E-Transport Initiative in India 55 RFID

A technology lying largely unused since World War II has suddenly caught the attention of the whole world. The emergence of the industry led global RFID standard has accelerated the adoption of this new technology across sectors. It has helped to fully unlock and open existing opportunities and business applications responsive to today’s global needs. Design, Development and implementation of computer-based information systems and associated communication networks have led to the deployment and usage of this wireless technology. According to MCKINSEY & COMPANY, “Railways in India is a sunrise industry! Indian Railways has got the status of super ‘JEWEL’. The Indian Railways (IR) is a truly great institution. It is a global giant that operates profitably, effectively and with relatively little government support”. The vastness of railways – cars, cargo, track, countries and conditions – presents a massive challenge for management of rolling stock and rail operations. Intellectual Property and Innovation Company’s( IPICO’s) low cost, passive RF technology enables consistently accurate identification and control of assets in virtually any operating environment. This paper tries to scrutinize the loopholes that exist in the system and examines the modus operandi of RFID technology to address such problems

Remote Power Analysis of {RFID} Tags

We describe the first power analysis attack on passive RFID tags. Compared to standard power analysis attacks, this attack is unique in that it requires no physical contact with the device under attack. The power analysis can be carried out even if both the tag and the attacker are passive and transmit no data, making the attack very hard to detect. As a proof of concept, we use power analysis to extract the kill passwords from Class 1 EPC tags operating in the UHF frequency range. Tags from several major vendors were successfully attacked. Our attack can be extended to HF tags and to remote fault analysis. The main significance of our attack is not in the discovery of kill passwords but in its implications on future tag design -- any cryptographic functionality built into tags needs to be designed to be resistant to power analysis, and achieving this resistance is an undertaking which has an effect both on the price and on the performance of tags. (this is my Master\u27s thesis, carried out under the supervision of Prof. Adi Shamir. It may be considered as the extended version of the article Remote Password Extraction from RFID Tags , recently published in IEEE Transactions on Computers and indexed as http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TC.2007.1050 or as http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/12/4288079/04288095.pdf

Energy aware improved least and most significant bit arbitration algorithm for WORM tags

AbstractPassive Radio Frequency Identification systems have gained enormous attention and popularity especially after its adoption in time and data critical systems. Theoretically, these systems have the potential to read over 100 tags per second in applications which are well insulated from RF noise. Nevertheless, this may not be the case in practical systems, as tag collision is one of the major deterrents affecting the recognition rate. This paper exhaustively analyses the existing probabilistic, deterministic and hybrid algorithms on collision resolutions. In probabilistic algorithms, tags send their entire ID to the RFID reader in respective slots while tags in deterministic algorithms respond bit by bit based on the RFID reader’s query. To minimize identification delay, tag communication overhead and high energy consumption, a new energy efficient collision resolution strategy named Improved Least and Most Significant Bit Algorithm (LaMSBA) is introduced to effectively singulate a tag and increase the identification efficiency in changing tag population even when the bits in tag ID’s are randomly or uniformly distributed. Extensive simulation studies show that LaMSBA can be chosen as better alternatives for dense time and data critical RFID enabled systems. In addition, M/G/1 Queuing model is suitably identified and the the analytical results concluded that LaMSBA is able to maintain the steady state condition even when Class 1 tags arrive at the rate of 15 tags/second in the reader’s interrogation zone

Integrating the Supply Chain with RFID: A Technical and Business Analysis

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the technical and business implications of adopting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in organizational settings. The year 2004 marked a significant shift toward adopting RFID because of mandates by large retailers and government organizations. The use of RFID technology is expected to increase rapidly in the next few years. At present, however, initial barriers against widespread adoption include standards, interoperability, costs, forward compatibility, and lack of familiarity. This paper describes basic components of an RFID system including tags, readers, and antennas and how they work together using an integrated supply chain model. Our analysis suggests that business needs to overcome human resource scarcity, security, legal and financial challenges and make informed decision regarding standards and process reengineering. The technology is not fully mature and suffers from issues of attenuation and interference. A laboratory experiment conducted by the authors\u27 shows that the middleware is not yet at a plug-and-play stage, which means that initial adopters need to spend considerable effort to integrate RFID into their existing business processes. Appendices contain a glossary of common RFID terms, a list of RFID vendors and detailed findings of the laboratory experiment. NOTE: BECAUSE OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS USED, THIS ARTICLE IS LONG; APPROXIMATELY 850KB IN BOTH JOURNAL AND ARTICLE VERSIO

An Energy-Efficient ECC Processor of UHF RFID Tag for Banknote Anti-Counterfeiting

In this paper, we present the design and analysis of an energy-efficient 163-b elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) processor suitable for passive ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that are usable for banknote authentication and anti-counterfeiting. Even partial public key cryptographic functionality has long been thought to consume too much power and to be too slow to be usable in passive UHF RFID systems. Utilizing a low-power design strategy with optimized register file management and an architecture based on the López-Dahab Algorithm, we designed a low-power ECC processor that is used with a modified ECC-DH authentication protocol. The ECC-DH authentication protocol is compatible with the ISO/IEC 18000-63 (“Gen2”) passive UHF RFID protocol. The ECC processor requires 12 145 gate equivalents. The ECC processor consumes 5.04 nJ/b at a frequency of 960 kHz when implemented in a 0.13-μm standard CMOS process. The tag identity authentication function requires 30 600 cycles to complete all scalar multiplication operations. This size, speed, and power of the ECC processor makes it practical to use within a passive UHF RFID tag and achieve up to 1500 banknote authentications per minute, which is sufficient for use in the fastest banknote counting machines

RFID ownership transfer with positive secrecy capacity channels

RFID ownership transfer protocols (OTPs) transfer tag ownership rights. Recently, there has been considerable interest in such protocols, however, guaranteeing privacy for symmetric-key settings without trusted third parties (TTPs) is a challenge still unresolved. In this paper, we address this issue and show that it can be solved by using channels with positive secrecy capacity. We implement these channels with noisy tags and provide practical values, thus proving that perfect secrecy is theoretically possible. We then define a communication model that captures spatiotemporal events and describe a first example of symmetric-key based OTP that: (i) is formally secure in the proposed communication model and (ii) achieves privacy with a noisy tag wiretap channel without TTPs

Attacks on the HF Physical Layer of Contactless and RFID Systems

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Improving Security and Privacy in Large-Scale RFID Systems

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies lay in the very heart of Internet of Things (IoT), in which every physical objects are tagged and identified in an internet-like structure. High performance and privacy-preserving interrogations of individual tags, generally called private tag authentication, is crucial for effective monitoring and management of a large number of objects with RFID tags. An RFID system consists of RF readers and RF tags. RF tags are attached to objects, and used as a unique identifier of the objects. RFID technologies enable a number of business and personal applications, and smooth the way for physical transactions in the real world, such as supply chain management, transportation payment, animal identification, warehouse operations, and more. Though bringing great productivity gains, RFID systems may cause new security and privacy threats to individuals or organizations, which have become a major obstacle for their wide adaptions. Therefore, it is important to address the security and privacy issues in RFID systems. In this dissertation, we investigate two important security and privacy issues for large-scale RFID systems. First, we discuss the private tag authentication problems. In a singulation process, an RF reader first sends a query and energizes an RF tag, and then the tag replies its ID or data to the reader. As the tag\u27s ID itself is sensitive information, the reply from tags must be protected against various threats, such as eavesdropping and compromise attacks, where tags are physically tampered and the keys associated with compromised tags are disclosed to adversaries. Fast and secure object identification, generally called private tag authentication, is critical to efficiently monitor and manage a large number of objects with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies. In a singulation process, an RF reader queries an RF tag, and then the tag replies its ID or data to the reader. Since the tags ID itself is private information, the reply must be protected against various threats, such as eavesdropping and com-promised attacks, where tags are physically tampered and the keys associated with compromised tags are disclosed to adversaries. Hence a large amount of efforts have been made to protect tags replies with low-cost operations, e.g., the XOR operation and 16-bit pseudo random functions (PRFs). In the primitive solution, a tag sends a hashed ID, instead of its real ID, to a reader, and then, the reader searches the corresponding entry in the back-end server. While this approach defends tags replies against various attacks, the authentication speed is of 0(N), where N is the number of tags in the system. Hence, such a straightforward approach is not practical for large-scale RFID systems. In order to efficiently and securely read tags content, private authentication protocols with structured key management have been proposed. In these schemes, each tag has its unique key and a set of groups keys. Groups keys are shared by several tags and used to confine the search space of a unique key. With efficient data structures, the tag authentication completes within 0(log k N). How-ever, private authentication protocols with structured key management unfortunately reduce the degree of privacy, should some tags in the system be compromised. This is because group keys are shared by several tags, and physical tampering of some tags makes the other tags less anonymous. How to remedy this issue is equivalent to reducing the probability that two tags share common group keys (hence after we refer to it as the correlation probability). The introduction of random walking over a data structure, e.g., randomized tree-walking and randomized skip-lists, significantly reduces the correlation probability. Nevertheless, two tags are still correlated should they have same groups keys at all the levels of in a balanced tree or skip lists. In our study, we design a private tag authentication protocol, namely Randomized Skip Graphs-Based Authentication (RSGA), in which unique and group keys are maintained with a skip graph. The RSGA achieves lower correlation probability than the existing scheme while maintaining the same authentication speed as the tree structure. Second, we discuss the fast and secure grouping problems. In the large-scale RFID systems, categorization and grouping of individual items with RF tags are critical for efficient object monitoring and management. For example, when tags belonging to the same group share a common group ID, the reader can transmit the same data simultaneously to the group ID, and it is possible to save considerably the communication overhead as compared with the conventional unicast transmission. To this end, Liu et al. recently propose a set of tag grouping protocols, which enables multicast-like communications for simultaneous data access and distribution to the tags in the same group. In the reality, not only the performance issue, but also security and privacy-preserving mechanisms in RFID protocols are important for protecting the assets of individuals and organizations. Although a number of works have been done for protecting tag\u27s privacy, to the best of our knowledge, the problem of private tag grouping is yet to be addressed. To address the problem of private tag grouping in a large-scale RFID system, we first formulate the problem of private tag grouping and define the privacy model based on the random oracle model. As a baseline protocol, we design a private traditional polling grouping (PrivTPG) protocol based on traditional tag polling protocol. Since PrivTPG is a straightforward approach, it can take a long time. Hence, based on the idea of broadcasting group IDs, we propose a private enhanced polling grouping (PrivEPG) protocol. To further improve the efficiency of tag grouping, we propose a private Bloom filter-based grouping (PrivBFG) protocol. These protocols broadcast unencrypted group IDs. Therefore, we propose a private Cuckoo filter-based polling grouping (PrivCFG) protocol, which is a more secure protocol using a data structure called a cuckoo filter. Then, the protocol-level tag\u27s privacy of the proposed PrivTPG, PrivEPG, PrivBFG, and PrivCFG is proven by random oracles. In addition, computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed protocols with different configurations.首都大学東京, 2018-03-25, 修士（工学）首都大学東