RFID Fingerprints To Fight Tag Cloning

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.

Comments

Security enhancement at best

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[cortesoft]

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.

Solving the wrong problem

[lhunath]

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.