INTEND AND ACCOMPLISHMENT OF PROTECTED INFRASTRUCTURE IN DISSEMINATED RFID SYSTEMS

Privacy protection is the primary concern when RFID applications are deployed in our daily lives. Due to passive tags that are computationally weak, the non-encryption-based simulation protocols have been recently developed, in which wireless jamming is used. However, the existing private tag access protocols without sharing secrets depends on impractical assumptions hence difficult to deploy. To tackle this issue we redesign RFID architecture by dividing RFID reader into an RF activator and Trusted Shield Device (TSD). Then we proposed new coding scheme namely Random Flipping Random Jamming (RFRJ), to protect the tags contents. Analysis and simulation results validate our distributed architecture with the RFRJ coding scheme, which protects tag’s privacy against various adversaries like encoding collision, random guessing attack, correlation attack, eavesdropping, and ghost and leech attack

Cryptographic Protocols, Sensor Network Key Management, and RFID Authentication

This thesis includes my research on efficient cryptographic protocols, sensor network key management, and radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication protocols. Key exchange, identification, and public key encryption are among the fundamental protocols studied in cryptography. There are two important requirements for these protocols: efficiency and security. Efficiency is evaluated using the computational overhead to execute a protocol. In modern cryptography, one way to ensure the security of a protocol is by means of provable security. Provable security consists of a security model that specifies the capabilities and the goals of an adversary against the protocol, one or more cryptographic assumptions, and a reduction showing that breaking the protocol within the security model leads to breaking the assumptions. Often, efficiency and provable security are not easy to achieve simultaneously. The design of efficient protocols in a strict security model with a tight reduction is challenging. Security requirements raised by emerging applications bring up new research challenges in cryptography. One such application is pervasive communication and computation systems, including sensor networks and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. Specifically, sensor network key management and RFID authentication protocols have drawn much attention in recent years. In the cryptographic protocol part, we study identification protocols, key exchange protocols, and ElGamal encryption and its variant. A formal security model for challenge-response identification protocols is proposed, and a simple identification protocol is proposed and proved secure in this model. Two authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols are proposed and proved secure in the extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) model. The proposed AKE protocols achieve tight security reduction and efficient computation. We also study the security of ElGamal encryption and its variant, Damgard’s ElGamal encryption (DEG). Key management is the cornerstone of the security of sensor networks. A commonly recommended key establishment mechanism is based on key predistribution schemes (KPS). Several KPSs have been proposed in the literature. A KPS installs pre-assigned keys to sensor nodes so that two nodes can communicate securely if they share a key. Multi-path key establishment (MPKE) is one component of KPS which enables two nodes without a shared key to establish a key via multiple node-disjoint paths in the network. In this thesis, methods to compute the k-connectivity property of several representative key predistribution schemes are developed. A security model for MPKE and efficient and secure MPKE schemes are proposed. Scalable, privacy-preserving, and efficient authentication protocols are essential for the success of RFID systems. Two such protocols are proposed in this thesis. One protocol uses finite field polynomial operations to solve the scalability challenge. Its security is based on the hardness of the polynomial reconstruction problem. The other protocol improves a randomized Rabin encryption based RFID authentication protocol. It reduces the hardware cost of an RFID tag by using a residue number system in the computation, and it provides provable security by using secure padding schemes

Design and Analysis of Security Schemes for Low-cost RFID Systems

With the remarkable progress in microelectronics and low-power semiconductor technologies, Radio Frequency IDentification technology (RFID) has moved from obscurity into mainstream applications, which essentially provides an indispensable foundation to realize ubiquitous computing and machine perception. However, the catching and exclusive characteristics of RFID systems introduce growing security and privacy concerns. To address these issues are particularly challenging for low-cost RFID systems, where tags are extremely constrained in resources, power and cost. The primary reasons are: (1) the security requirements of low-cost RFID systems are even more rigorous due to large operation range and mass deployment; and (2) the passive tags' modest capabilities and the necessity to keep their prices low present a novel problem that goes beyond the well-studied problems of traditional cryptography. This thesis presents our research results on the design and the analysis of security schemes for low-cost RFID systems. Motivated by the recent attention on exploiting physical layer resources in the design of security schemes, we investigate how to solve the eavesdropping, modification and one particular type of relay attacks toward the tag-to-reader communication in passive RFID systems without requiring lightweight ciphers. To this end, we propose a novel physical layer scheme, called Backscatter modulation- and Uncoordinated frequency hopping-assisted Physical Layer Enhancement (BUPLE). The idea behind it is to use the amplitude of the carrier to transmit messages as normal, while to utilize its periodically varied frequency to hide the transmission from the eavesdropper/relayer and to exploit a random sequence modulated to the carrier's phase to defeat malicious modifications. We further improve its eavesdropping resistance through the coding in the physical layer, since BUPLE ensures that the tag-to-eavesdropper channel is strictly noisier than the tag-to-reader channel. Three practical Wiretap Channel Codes (WCCs) for passive tags are then proposed: two of them are constructed from linear error correcting codes, and the other one is constructed from a resilient vector Boolean function. The security and usability of BUPLE in conjunction with WCCs are further confirmed by our proof-of-concept implementation and testing. Eavesdropping the communication between a legitimate reader and a victim tag to obtain raw data is a basic tool for the adversary. However, given the fundamentality of eavesdropping attacks, there are limited prior work investigating its intension and extension for passive RFID systems. To this end, we firstly identified a brand-new attack, working at physical layer, against backscattered RFID communications, called unidirectional active eavesdropping, which defeats the customary impression that eavesdropping is a ``passive" attack. To launch this attack, the adversary transmits an un-modulated carrier (called blank carrier) at a certain frequency while a valid reader and a tag interacts at another frequency channel. Once the tag modulates the amplitude of reader's signal, it causes fluctuations on the blank carrier as well. By carefully examining the amplitude of the backscattered versions of the blank carrier and the reader's carrier, the adversary could intercept the ongoing reader-tag communication with either significantly lower bit error rate or from a significantly greater distance away. Our concept is demonstrated and empirically analyzed towards a popular low-cost RFID system, i.e., EPC Gen2. Although active eavesdropping in general is not trivial to be prohibited, for a particular type of active eavesdropper, namely a greedy proactive eavesdropper, we propose a simple countermeasure without introducing extra cost to current RFID systems. The needs of cryptographic primitives on constraint devices keep increasing with the growing pervasiveness of these devices. One recent design of the lightweight block cipher is Hummingbird-2. We study its cryptographic strength under a novel technique we developed, called Differential Sequence Attack (DSA), and present the first cryptanalytic result on this cipher. In particular, our full attack can be divided into two phases: preparation phase and key recovery phase. During the key recovery phase, we exploit the fact that the differential sequence for the last round of Hummingbird-2 can be retrieved by querying the full cipher, due to which, the search space of the secret key can be significantly reduced. Thus, by attacking the encryption (decryption resp.) of Hummingbird-2, our algorithm recovers 36-bit (another 28-bit resp.) out of 128-bit key with $2^{68}$ ($2^{60}$ resp.) time complexity if particular differential conditions of the internal states and of the keys at one round can be imposed. Additionally, the rest 64-bit of the key can be exhaustively searched and the overall time complexity is dominated by $2^{68}$. During the preparation phase, by investing $2^{81}$ effort in time, the adversary is able to create the differential conditions required in the key recovery phase with at least 0.5 probability. As an additional effort, we examine the cryptanalytic strength of another lightweight candidate known as A2U2, which is the most lightweight cryptographic primitive proposed so far for low-cost tags. Our chosen-plaintext-attack fully breaks this cipher by recovering its secret key with only querying the encryption twice on the victim tag and solving 32 sparse systems of linear equations (where each system has 56 unknowns and around 28 unknowns can be directly obtained without computation) in the worst case, which takes around 0.16 second on a Thinkpad T410 laptop

Security and privacy in RFID systems

Vu que les tags RFID sont actuellement en phase de large déploiement dans le cadre de plusieurs applications (comme les paiements automatiques, le contrôle d'accès à distance, et la gestion des chaînes d approvisionnement), il est important de concevoir des protocoles de sécurité garantissant la protection de la vie privée des détenteurs de tags RFID. Or, la conception de ces protocoles est régie par les limitations en termes de puissance et de calcul de la technologie RFID, et par les modèles de sécurité qui sont à notre avis trop forts pour des systèmes aussi contraints que les tags RFID. De ce fait, on limite dans cette thèse le modèle de sécurité; en particulier, un adversaire ne peut pas observer toutes les interactions entre tags et lecteurs. Cette restriction est réaliste notamment dans le contexte de la gestion des chaînes d approvisionnement qui est l application cible de ce travail. Sous cette hypothèse, on présente quatre protocoles cryptographiques assurant une meilleure collaboration entre les différents partenaires de la chaîne d approvisionnement. D abord, on propose un protocole de transfert de propriété des tags RFID, qui garantit l authentification des tags en temps constant alors que les tags implémentent uniquement des algorithmes symétriques, et qui permet de vérifier l'authenticité de l origine des tags. Ensuite, on aborde le problème d'authenticité des produits en introduisant deux protocoles de sécurité qui permettent à un ensemble de vérificateurs de vérifier que des tags sans capacité de calcul ont emprunté des chemins valides dans la chaîne d approvisionnement. Le dernier résultat présenté dans cette thèse est un protocole d appariement d objets utilisant des tags sans capacité de calcul , qui vise l automatisation des inspections de sécurité dans la chaîne d approvisionnement lors du transport des produits dangereux. Les protocoles introduits dans cette thèse utilisent les courbes elliptiques et les couplages bilinéaires qui permettent la construction des algorithmes de signature et de chiffrement efficaces, et qui minimisent donc le stockage et le calcul dans les systèmes RFID. De plus, la sécurité de ces protocoles est démontrée sous des modèles formels bien définis qui prennent en compte les limitations et les contraintes des tags RFID, et les exigences strictes en termes de sécurité et de la protection de la vie privée des chaines d approvisionnement.While RFID systems are one of the key enablers helping the prototype of pervasive computer applications, the deployment of RFID technologies also comes with new privacy and security concerns ranging from people tracking and industrial espionage to produ ct cloning and denial of service. Cryptographic solutions to tackle these issues were in general challenged by the limited resources of RFID tags, and by the formalizations of RFID privacy that are believed to be too strong for such constrained devices. It follows that most of the existing RFID-based cryptographic schemes failed at ensuring tag privacy without sacrificing RFID scalability or RFID cost effectiveness. In this thesis, we therefore relax the existing definitions of tag privacy to bridge the gap between RFID privacy in theory and RFID privacy in practice, by assuming that an adversary cannot continuously monitor tags. Under this assumption, we are able to design sec ure and privacy preserving multi-party protocols for RFID-enabled supply chains. Namely, we propose a protocol for tag ownership transfer that features constant-time authentication while tags are only required to compute hash functions. Then, we tackle the problem of product genuineness verification by introducing two protocols for product tracking in the supply chain that rely on storage only tags. Finally, we present a solution for item matching that uses storage only tags and aims at the automation of safety inspections in the supply chain.The protocols presented in this manuscript rely on operations performed in subgroups of elliptic curves that allow for the construction of short encryptions and signatures, resulting in minimal storage requirements for RFID tags. Moreover, the privacy and the security of these protocols are proven under well defined formal models that take into account the computational limitations of RFID technology and the stringent privacy and security requirements of each targeted supply chain application.PARIS-Télécom ParisTech (751132302) / SudocSudocFranceF

AN ARCHITECTURAL APPROACH FOR REDUCINGPOWER AND INCREASING SECURITY OF RFID TAGS

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is currently employed for a variety of applications such as RFID-based wireless payment, healthcare, homeland security, asset management,etc. Due to newer privacy requirements and increasingly secure applications, typical RFID tags are required to expand security features such as data encryption and safe transactions. However, RFID tags have extremely strict low-power consumption requirements. Thus, reduced power consumption and secure data transactions are two main problems for the next generation RFID tags.This dissertation presents an architectural approach to address these two main problems.This dissertation provides a multi-domain solution to improve the power consumption andsecurity, while also reducing design time and verification time of the system. In particular, Idescribe (1)a smart buffering technique to allow a tag to remain in a standby mode until addressed,(2)a multi-layer, low-power technique that transcends the passive-transaction, physical, and data layers to provide secure transactions, (3) an FPGA-based traffic profiler system to generate traces of RFID communications for both tag verification and power analysis without the need of actual hardware, and (4) a design automation technique to create physical layer encoding and decoding blocks in hardware suitable for RFID tags.This dissertation presents four contributions: (1) As a result, based on a Markov Process energymodel, the smart buffering technique is shown to reduce power consumption by 85% over a traditionalactive tag; (2) The multi-layer, low-power security technique provides protection againstmalicious reader attacks to disable the tag, to steal the information stored in or communicatedto the device. The power consumption overhead for implementing these layers of security is increased approximately 13% over the basic tag controller; (3) In addition, the FPGA-based traffic profiler system has been able to generate traces for ISO 18000 part 6C (EPC Gen2) protocol; and (4) The designs of endocing/decoding blocks are generated automatically by the Physical LayerSynthesis tool for five protocols used in or related to RFID. Consequently, any power consumption of five designs is less than 5 £gW. Furthermore, compared with five designs implemented by hand, the difference of the power consumption between two of them is less than 7% at most

Enhancing RFID performance and security in networked environments

In this thesis we propose and present a number of methods by which the performance and security of networked RFID systems can be improved. These include a networked P2P RFID architecture, a comprehensive RFID security framework, a RFID security protocol and an RFID malware detection and Prevention technique

Efficient Security Protocols for Constrained Devices

During the last decades, more and more devices have been connected to the Internet.Today, there are more devices connected to the Internet than humans.An increasingly more common type of devices are cyber-physical devices.A device that interacts with its environment is called a cyber-physical device.Sensors that measure their environment and actuators that alter the physical environment are both cyber-physical devices.Devices connected to the Internet risk being compromised by threat actors such as hackers.Cyber-physical devices have become a preferred target for threat actors since the consequence of an intrusion disrupting or destroying a cyber-physical system can be severe.Cyber attacks against power and energy infrastructure have caused significant disruptions in recent years.Many cyber-physical devices are categorized as constrained devices.A constrained device is characterized by one or more of the following limitations: limited memory, a less powerful CPU, or a limited communication interface.Many constrained devices are also powered by a battery or energy harvesting, which limits the available energy budget.Devices must be efficient to make the most of the limited resources.Mitigating cyber attacks is a complex task, requiring technical and organizational measures.Constrained cyber-physical devices require efficient security mechanisms to avoid overloading the systems limited resources.In this thesis, we present research on efficient security protocols for constrained cyber-physical devices.We have implemented and evaluated two state-of-the-art protocols, OSCORE and Group OSCORE.These protocols allow end-to-end protection of CoAP messages in the presence of untrusted proxies.Next, we have performed a formal protocol verification of WirelessHART, a protocol for communications in an industrial control systems setting.In our work, we present a novel attack against the protocol.We have developed a novel architecture for industrial control systems utilizing the Digital Twin concept.Using a state synchronization protocol, we propagate state changes between the digital and physical twins.The Digital Twin can then monitor and manage devices.We have also designed a protocol for secure ownership transfer of constrained wireless devices. Our protocol allows the owner of a wireless sensor network to transfer control of the devices to a new owner.With a formal protocol verification, we can guarantee the security of both the old and new owners.Lastly, we have developed an efficient Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) protocol.PSA allows devices to send encrypted measurements to an aggregator.The aggregator can combine the encrypted measurements and calculate the decrypted sum of the measurements.No party will learn the measurement except the device that generated it

Advanced Radio Frequency Identification Design and Applications

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a modern wireless data transmission and reception technique for applications including automatic identification, asset tracking and security surveillance. This book focuses on the advances in RFID tag antenna and ASIC design, novel chipless RFID tag design, security protocol enhancements along with some novel applications of RFID

Privacy-preserving E-ticketing Systems for Public Transport Based on RFID/NFC Technologies

Pervasive digitization of human environment has dramatically changed our everyday lives. New technologies which have become an integral part of our daily routine have deeply affected our perception of the surrounding world and have opened qualitatively new opportunities. In an urban environment, the influence of such changes is especially tangible and acute. For example, ubiquitous computing (also commonly referred to as UbiComp) is a pure vision no more and has transformed the digital world dramatically. Pervasive use of smartphones, integration of processing power into various artefacts as well as the overall miniaturization of computing devices can already be witnessed on a daily basis even by laypersons. In particular, transport being an integral part of any urban ecosystem have been affected by these changes. Consequently, public transport systems have undergone transformation as well and are currently dynamically evolving. In many cities around the world, the concept of the so-called electronic ticketing (e-ticketing) is being extensively used for issuing travel permissions which may eventually result in conventional paper-based tickets being completely phased out already in the nearest future. Opal Card in Sydney, Oyster Card in London, Touch & Travel in Germany and many more are all the examples of how well the e-ticketing has been accepted both by customers and public transport companies. Despite numerous benefits provided by such e-ticketing systems for public transport, serious privacy concern arise. The main reason lies in the fact that using these systems may imply the dramatic multiplication of digital traces left by individuals, also beyond the transport scope. Unfortunately, there has been little effort so far to explicitly tackle this issue. There is still not enough motivation and public pressure imposed on industry to invest into privacy. In academia, the majority of solutions targeted at this problem quite often limit the real-world pertinence of the resultant privacy-preserving concepts due to the fact that inherent advantages of e-ticketing systems for public transport cannot be fully leveraged. This thesis is aimed at solving the aforementioned problem by providing a privacy-preserving framework which can be used for developing e-ticketing systems for public transport with privacy protection integrated from the outset. At the same time, the advantages of e-ticketing such as fine-grained billing, flexible pricing schemes, and transparent use (which are often the main drivers for public to roll out such systems) can be retained