Slashdot Mirror
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."
Uncloneable today - cloned tomorrow...
And this time we really mean it!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Verayo launched the worldâ(TM)s first unclonable silicon chip â" the Vera X512H RFID chip. This new RFID chip is based on recently announced breakthrough technology called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). PUF technology is a type of electronic DNA or fingerprinting technology for silicon chips that makes each chip unclonable. Verayoâ(TM)s PUF-based RFID technology offers
So, is it unclonable?
Let's have a pool to see when it's cloned. I got by the end of the year by a Stanford student.
Forgive me for my ignorance (and I haven't RTFA), but my understanding of RFID is the only way to tell what an RFID device is is by listening to it broadcast. Well, if you listen to a device broadcast enough, particularly if you listen in on a conversation between it and what it's supposed to talk to...doesn't it then become relatively simple to create your own RFID device that broadcasts all the same things as the original chip, and responds in all the same ways to input?
Seems to me it's just another instance of "DRM doesn't work," only in this case all the communication between supposedly secure nodes literally has to take place in the open air...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Shouldn't this article have been posted in the Humor section? I know I got a chuckle out of it.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I'd take your bet, but odds are, it's already been cloned.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Most obvious mechanism is that the chip has sufficient intelligence to be able to cryptographically identify itself using public key cryptography, and the keypair is embedded on the chip at the manufacturing stage.
Would work beautifully, but it's completely broken the day someone manages to get the private key out of it.
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.
From the illustration, it looks like a simple challenge response mechanism. All I have to say is: duh!
So they finally added some form of authentication. This is what smart cards were supposed to be when I first heard about them 10 years ago. Simple RFID was never intended to be used for something secure: it was meant to replace bar codes or magnetic strips.
What you are talking about is a passive RFID device, like most offense keycards from the 80's and early 90s. RFID nowadays is more complex, with the devices having a small computer chip in it that is actually powered up by the RFID. Having this chip allows secure encryption between the device and the terminal such that sniffing in on the conversation should get you no further than sniffing on a properly negotiated SSH session will.
The hole in the scheme of course is, if the crook gets his hands on the keyfob for a short period of time, it is the same as having your SSH private key, and he can clone the chip in the keyfob and return the original without you even knowing.
This company is saying they have a new chip that incorporates physical properties of the chip itself int the encryption somehow such that cloneing it would be recognizable.
Texas A&M may be able to find an organic replacement for the silicon used in the chip, and then implant it in farm animals to further research on the effects of "I can't beleive its NOT silicon" based RFID chips in them.
August 4, 2009
Hackers at the annual DEFCON conference have announced they have succeeded in cloning the "unclonable" RFID chip. Jerry "Botnet" Goldblatt led the effort in defeating the security on the RFID chip. According to Jerry, "Cloning the 'unclonable' RFID chip was even easier than breaking Oracle's 'unbreakable' Linux. It just goes to show that marketing runs IT." The team is now accepting donations of Red Bull, Grey Goose and Hawaiian skunk as they add a module to metasploit to further simplify the attack.
In theory (crypto theory), this can be done if the parties communicating have a shared secret piece of data and a crypto algorithm, resistant to reverse-engineering from outside, that enables them to exchange that secret data without eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, or a brute-force cracking of the crypto algorithm.
This is quite hard to do properly in general, as the plethora of lousy cryptosystems attests. It *can* be done if one has enough processing power (tough for RFID chips that operate from microwatts of someone else's broadcast RF energy) and a good enough encryption algorithm (see "lousy cryptosystems" above).
Of course, if you can duplicate the data content and algorithms of the RFID chip, say by physically dismantling it layer-by-layer with a destructive analysis, you can clone it even if you don't know the shared secret. The article is claiming (without ANY credible evidence, BTW) to have somehow made this impossible, presumably by creating some random-but-repeatable property in the chip that cannot be extracted by analysis for reproduction in a cloned chip. Unless they've come up with something VERY effective, I'd bet on this system being cracked within months just like all the other RFID schemes. The lack of description or references to how their system works smells like bad crypto and security-by-obscurity to me.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
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
I couldn't guess how soon it'll happen, but I'll tell you what sound it'll make when it does: "PUF"
so technically would one be guilty of making an obscene clone fall?
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
This chip utilizes PUFs (so called Physically Unclonable Functions). These are currently a hot topic of research, especially in the secure embedded computing community.
The fundamental idea is that a PUF should produce a unique value for a chip, in a repeatable fashion, with a side effect that modification of the chip will be detectable.
PUFs are of 4 main types -
1. Optical - These are the oldest forms of PUFs. They started with physicists trying to use chips as diffraction gratings. You shine a laser at the silicon vias and record the signature of light. These require depackaging the chip in question and are mostly impractical
2. Silicon - Usually implemented as long delay lines, but are sensitive to environmental conditions (mainly temperature & injected faults) There remains an ongoing research attempt to make these better (less reliant on environmental factors)
3. Coating - These are currently considered one of the best forms of PUFs. The topmost layer of the chip has some embedded metal flakes. The bottom layer of the chip has a capacitance sensor. Since the distribution of the metal flakes is random, the capacitance is random and unique to each chip (the resolution of the capacitance sensor is tuned to ensure this). This method has the added advantage that the minute someone tries to attack the chip, by depackaging it, the capacitance changes and the chips data (usually the secret key for an encryption cipher such as AES/DES) can be wiped. The main problem is that it adds a few extra fab steps , which means it increases the cost. Additionally, the first calibration costs more money to do.
4. Intrinsic - These are the current area of research. In particular for FPGAs. As any hardware designer knows, RAM cells are initalized to random values, but most FPGAs have some small logic which resets them all to zero. If we remove that logic, we have a chip, which has a whole bunch of random numbers, which will usually initialize the same way, based on process variation etc. This technique has been shown for FPAGs and will probably be brought over soon to full scale chips.
In order to keep this short, i have omitted a lot of references, but you can find more info, about intrinsic PUFS here.
Actually Phillips does a lot of research with PUFs and I am surprised that Verayo claims to be the first maker of PUF based chips.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
Plan 9 from User Space.
Seriously.
All one would have to do, provided there is a limited amount of responses (which seems plausible considering it is embedded in the chip), just carpet-bomb the RFID with queries. Burn up all them responses, and "Presto!", useless chip. And THAT could be done while some guy is standing next to you on the subway. Get to work and the fucking thing doesn't function anymore.
Now, if they used a rotating list of responses, the same carpet-bombing would reveal that, eventually resulting in a list of correct responses to queries.
Yay for ineffective technology!
If nothing else, it will inhibit the use of them if people that have them for legitimate uses find them unusable all the time.
The chip is not a public key crypto device; it looks like it has an unique hashing function built in. The system is based on a manufacturer-controlled database of message and digest values. Once the RFID reader detects this chip, it gets its ID and sends to the manufacturer database; the database sends back a one-time message for the chip to hash (the one-time thing is crucial - it guarantees that a given challenge will not be sent twice, so no replay attack and no MITM on the network connection from the reader to the manufacturer DB). The digest is sent back and if the stored digest and the one returned by the reader match, the chip's identity is confirmed. It seems that the manufacturer builds a database of message / digest values after getting the chip from the vendor treating it as a black box device, and the hashing algorithm never leaves the RFID vendor.
The chip might also be a stateful device, but this would introduce many problems (if the manufacturer DB gets out of sync with the chip, it's useless).
I think that obtaining the original chip (stealing it) would be always easier than duplicating it with this system. To successfully attack it (convince an uncompromised reader that you have the true chip) you would have to:
a) Record all possible responses to all possible challenges from the original chip. I think this is the way the system is particularly resilient to - if the message and response are at least 64 bits long, or there is any delay, then it is impossible.
b) Replicate the chip physically, using a microscope. This is theoretically possible but would be extremely costly, and probably unfeasible.
c) Steal the hashing algorithm from the RFID vendor. This would give you next to nothing if the hashing algorithm used a seed that is never broadcast from the chip (eg. serial # from the picture), so you would have to resort to b) to get it.
d) Steal the C/R database from the manufacturer. This is probably the easiest way, but the manufacturer can't notice or you have to steal the data for very many chips, making revoking them all a major blow for the company.
The main idea here is not being able to construct a fake chip based on data the real chip broadcasts.
Any other ideas?
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.