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RFID Fingerprints To Fight Tag Cloning

Posted by Soulskill on from the cloning-is-bad-haven't-you-seen-scifi dept.

Bourdain writes with news out of the University of Arkansas, where researchers are looking for ways to combat counterfeit RFID tags. Passive tags typically wait for a reader to transmit a signal of the appropriate strength and frequency before sending their own transmission. The scientists found that the amount of power required to trigger this varies quite a bit from one tag to the next, especially when many different frequencies are sampled. This and other physical characteristics give the tag its own "fingerprint" that is independent of the signal information stored in its memory, which the researchers say will facilitate the detection of cloned tags.

4 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Security enhancement at best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you can read the fingerprint, so can anyone...

    So what's to stop a dedicated attacker from reading the fingerprint when they read the tag contents, and then devising a method to duplicate all the data?

    An active tag might even be programmed to emulate the fingerprint characteristics.

  2. Re:What's the point? by cortesoft · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Crypto wouldn't work... the cloner doesn't have to break the encryption to copy the chip.

    Imagine in this way.... you have an encrypted hard drive, and someone wants to pass off their hard drive as yours. They don't have to break the encryption... they can copy the drive byte for byte, and hand it to the person who if verifying that is the original. The person checking the data is the one who does the decrypting.

  3. Solving the wrong problem by lhunath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    RFID tags are not security devices, they are hyped barcodes. They do not provide any authentication.

    If you're worrying about your RFID tags being cloned for a malicious purpose, you are using them for the wrong thing.

    --
    ``OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?''
  4. Re:What's the point? by AdamInParadise · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Encrypting a hard drive protects the confidentiality of its data. It does not prevent you from cloning the hard drive i.e. it does not protect the authenticity of the hard drive.

    In many applications that use RFID tags, authenticity is much more important than confidentiality. Those researchers seem to propose a way to authenticate the RFID tag using its "fingerprint". What I'm saying is that a dynamic challenge-response scheme is much more practical and more reliable.

    Crypto is not only about encrypting data.

    --
    Nobox: Only simple products.