World's First "Unclonable" RFID Chip

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a new RFID chip from Verayo claims to be unclonable through the use of the new Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), sort of an electronic DNA for silicon chips. "Basic passive RFID chips can be easily cloned by copying the data residing on one chip to another. Verayo's PUF-based RFID chips cannot be cloned, and provide a very strong and robust authentication mechanism. No other chip or device can be disguised as the original chip, even if the data is copied from one Verayo RFID chip to another."

Comments

Why is this automatically discredited?

[jeffmeden]

You conduct overheard conversations all the time and have no issue with considering them "secure": namely via SSL/TLS encryption. All that's necessary to create an RFID that can't be completely duplicated is for the chip to hold on to more information than it broadcasts, and then only reveal that information in a clever way (asymmetric encryption). A well coded challenge-response handshake can allow the reader and chip to conduct a conversation that is 'unique' and cannot be easily duplicated later on. Sure, there is the potential for it to be improperly coded, or downright misrepresented. However, don't count it as a failure before it's even seen the light of day.

Re:Isn't that logically impossible?

[corsec67]

You could have a more powerful RFID tag that has some computation ability. This would allow you to generate a new code for every communication, preventing your replay attack.

If the list of request-responses was a true one time pad, then they might actually have some fairly good security from a radio attack, but the number of queries to the rfid tag would be finite.

If they use any kind of cipher, then it is very much open to attack.

They used Unclonable and DNA in the same sentence

[cutecub]

The use of language is strange.

Unclonable: cannot be cloned
DNA: a molecule that clones itself.

Its not the best choice of marketing metaphor.

Its like saying that an event is possibly inevitable.

-Sean

Re:Yeah?

[NotBornYesterday]

Okay, so according to TFA (yeah I know, not supposed to read it, yadda yadda yadda), it looks like the RFID device isn't authenticated by its ID, but by a series of challenge-and-response tokens it has that are also stored in some central database, which appear to increment as they are used.

There appears to be a finite number of challenge-response pairs in the authentication database. How limited is that number? Are they also stored on board the RFID tag? Are they generated from the serial# and/or ID#?

What is the length of the challenge, and of the response? Could a captured item (ie, passport) with such an RFID tag be brute-force interrogated (hit with a series of random-number "challenges" to see which might elicit stored "responses"), and counterfeited that way?

Could this scheme be vulnerable to MITM-style attack?