Distributed Wireless Algorithms for RFID Systems: Grouping Proofs and Cardinality Estimation

The breadth and depth of the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are becoming more substantial. RFID is a technology useful for identifying unique items through radio waves. We design algorithms on RFID-based systems for the Grouping Proof and Cardinality Estimation problems. A grouping-proof protocol is evidence that a reader simultaneously scanned the RFID tags in a group. In many practical scenarios, grouping-proofs greatly expand the potential of RFID-based systems such as supply chain applications, simultaneous scanning of multiple forms of IDs in banks or airports, and government paperwork. The design of RFID grouping-proofs that provide optimal security, privacy, and efficiency is largely an open area, with challenging problems including robust privacy mechanisms, addressing completeness and incompleteness (missing tags), and allowing dynamic groups definitions. In this work we present three variations of grouping-proof protocols that implement our mechanisms to overcome these challenges. Cardinality estimation is for the reader to determine the number of tags in its communication range. Speed and accuracy are important goals. Many practical applications need an accurate and anonymous estimation of the number of tagged objects. Examples include intelligent transportation and stadium management. We provide an optimal estimation algorithm template for cardinality estimation that works for a {0,1,e} channel, which extends to most estimators and ,possibly, a high resolution {0,1,...,k-1,e} channel

A comprehensive RFID solution to enhance inpatient medication safety

Errors involving medication administration can be costly, both in financial and in human terms. Indeed, there is much potential for errors due to the complexity of the medication administration process. Nurses are often singled out as the only responsible of these errors because they are in charge of drug administration. Nevertheless, the interventions of every actor involved in the process and the system design itself contribute to errors (Wakefield et al. (1998) [23]). Proper inpatient medication safety systems can help to reduce such errors in hospitals. In this paper, we review in depth two recent proposals (Chien et al. (2010) [7]; Huang and Ku (2009) [12]) that pursue the aforementioned objective. Unfortunately, they fail in their attempt mainly due to their security faults but interesting ideas can be drawn from both. These security faults refer to impersonation and replay attacks that could produce the generation of a forged proof stating that certain medication was administered to an inpatient when it was not. We propose a leading-edge solution to enhance inpatient medication safety based on RFID technology that overcomes these weaknesses. Our solution, named Inpatient Safety RFID system (IS-RFID), takes into account the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure of a hospital and covers every phase of the drug administration process. From a practical perspective, our system can be easily integrated within hospital IT infrastructures, has a moderate cost, is very ease to use and deals with security aspects as a key point.This work was partially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under the RUBICON grant "Intrusion Detection in Ubiquitous Computing Technologies" awarded to Aikaterini Mitrokotsa.Publicad

Probabilistic yoking proofs for large scale IoT systems

Yoking (or grouping) proofs were introduced in 2004 as a security construction for RFID applications in which it is needed to build an evidence that several objects have been scanned simultaneously or, at least, within a short time. Such protocols were designed for scenarios where only a few tags (typically just two) are involved, so issues such as preventing an object from abandoning the proof right after being interrogated simply do not make sense. The idea, however, is very interesting for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications where a potentially large population of objects must be grouped together. In this paper we address this issue by presenting the notion of Probabilistic Yoking Proofs (PYP) and introducing three main criteria to assess their performance: cost, security, and fairness. Our proposal combines the message structure found in classical grouping proof constructions with an iterative Poisson sampling process where the probability of each object being sampled varies over time. We introduce a number of mechanisms to apply fluctuations to each object's sampling probability and present different sampling strategies. Our experimental results confirm that most strategies achieve good security and fairness levels while keeping the overall protocol cost down. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work was supported by the MINECO Grant TIN2013 46469 R (SPINY: Security and Privacy in the Internet of You)

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

SLEC: A Novel Serverless RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Since the RFID server, reader, and tag communicate via insecure channels, mutual authentication between the reader and the tag is necessary for secure communication. The central database server supports the authentication of the reader and the tag by storing and managing the network data. Recent lightweight RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. A serverless RFID system is a new promising solution to alternate the central database for mobile RFID models. In this model, the reader and the tag perform the mutual authentication without the support of the central database server. However, many security challenges arise from implementing the lightweight RFID authentication protocols in the serverless RFID network. We propose a new robust serverless RFID authentication protocol based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to prevent the security attacks on the network and maintain the confidentiality and the privacy of the authentication messages and tag information and location. While most of the current protocols assume a secure channel in the setup phase to transmit the communication data, we consider in our protocol an insecure setup phase between the server, reader, and tag to ensure that the data can be renewed from any checkpoint server along with the route of the mobile RFID network. Thus, we implemented the elliptic curve cryptography in the setup phase (renewal phase) to transmit and store the data and the public key of the server to any reader or tag so that the latter can perform the mutual authentication successfully. The proposed model is compared under the classification of the serverless model in term of computation cost and security resistance