Preventing Identity Attacks in RFID Backscatter Communication Systems: A Physical-layer Approach

Abstract

This work considers identity attack on a radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based backscatter communication system. Specifically, we consider a singlereader, single-tag RFID system whereby the reader and the tag undergo two-way signaling which enables the reader to extract the tag ID in order to authenticate the legitimate tag (L-tag). We then consider a scenario whereby a malicious tag (M-tag)-having the same ID as the Ltag programmed in its memory by a wizard-attempts to deceive the reader by pretending to be the L-tag. To this end, we counter the identity attack by exploiting the non-reciprocity of the end-to-end channel (i.e., the residual channel) between the reader and the tag as the fingerprint of the tag. The passive nature of the tag(s) (and thus, lack of any computational platform at the tag) implies that the proposed lightweight physical-layer authentication method is implemented at the reader. To be concrete, in our proposed scheme, the reader acquires the raw data via two-way (challenge-response) message exchange mechanism, does least-squares estimation to extract the fingerprint, and does binary hypothesis testing to do authentication. We also provide closed-form expressions for the two error probabilities of interest (i.e., false alarm and missed detection). Simulation results attest to the efficacy of the proposed method.

Radio frequency sensing and its innovative applications in diverse sectors: A comprehensive study

“…Identity attacks in back-scatter communication are another major concern. A physical layer authentication via a residual channel at the reader end could possibly be one of the solutions (Mehmood et al, 2020), but there is still room to improve the accuracy of such schemes when deployed in densely populated tag areas. Just like the RF sensing and IoT devices, RFID communication also poses several technical challenges and its use in daily life for assistive living.…”

BCAuth: Physical Layer Enhanced Authentication and Attack Tracing for Backscatter Communications

“…Zanetti et al [17] proposed a fingerprinting scheme that measures average baseband power (ABP) and time interval error (TIE) from the fixed RN16 preamble as tag identification information. Mehmood et al [23] used the non-reciprocity of the residual channel between a reader and an RFID tag as the fingerprint of the tag to defend fault tag attacks. However, such features, e.g., modulation shape and TIE, are sensitive to environments, thus unstable for device authentication when BD is moving.…”

“…Geneprint [22] leverages the internal similarity of backscattered signals to extract BD hardware features for authentication in RFID systems. Mehmood et al [23] used the non-reciprocity of the residual channel between a reader and an RFID tag as the fingerprint of the tag to defend fault tag attacks. However, the existing works about RFID tag authentication including the above [17], [22], [24], [25] assume a sophisticated signal analyzer applied by an RFID reader to extract specific features.…”

“…Second, it is hard to authenticate mobile BDs. Prior arts about physical layer authentication mainly focus on static BD authentication [20], [21], [23], [27]. Seldom, they consider BD mobility, especially when a BD could move across the coverage of multiple APs.…”

Security of Underwater and Air-Water Wireless Communication

“…2) Physical Layer Security (PLS): PLS is increasingly becoming an attractive area of research due to its promising performances in many wireless communication systems [149][150][151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158]. PlS exploits the random nature of the physical layer for security purposes, which not only enhances security, but also greatly improve efficiency.…”