Continuous location authentication (CLA) seeks to continuously and automatically verify the physical presence of legitimate users in a protected indoor area. CLA can play an important role in contexts where access to electrical or physical resources must be limited to physically present legitimate users. In this paper, we present WearRF-CLA, a novel CLA scheme built upon increasingly popular wrist wearables and UHF RFID systems. WearRF-CLA explores the observation that human daily routines in a protected indoor area comprise a sequence of human-states (e.g., walking and sitting) that follow predictable state transitions. Each legitimate WearRF-CLA user registers his/her RFID tag and also wrist wearable during system enrollment. After the user enters a protected area, WearRF-CLA continuously collects and processes the gyroscope data of the wrist wearable and the phase data of the RFID tag signals to verify three factors to determine the user's physical presence/absence without explicit user involvement: (1) the tag ID as in a traditional RFID authentication system, (2) the validity of the human-state chain, and (3) the continuous coexistence of the paired wrist wearable and RFID tag with the user. The user passes CLA if and only if all three factors can be validated. Extensive user experiments on commodity smartwatches and UHF RFID devices confirm the very high security and low authentication latency of WearRF-CLA.
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Rhythmic RFID Authentication
Passive RFID technology is widely used in user authentication and access control. We propose RF-Rhythm, a secure and usable two-factor RFID authentication system with strong resilience to lost/stolen/cloned RFID cards. In RF-Rhythm, each legitimate user performs a sequence of taps on his/her RFID card according to a self-chosen secret melody. Such rhythmic taps can induce phase changes in the backscattered signals, which the RFID reader can detect to recover the user’s tapping rhythm. In addition to verifying the RFID card’s identification information as usual, the backend server compares the extracted tapping rhythm with what it acquires in the user enrollment phase. The user passes authentication checks if and only if both verifications succeed. We also propose a novel phase-hopping protocol in which the RFID reader emits Continuous Wave (CW) with random phases for extracting the user’s secret tapping rhythm. Our protocol can prevent a capable adversary from extracting and then replaying a legitimate tapping rhythm from sniffed RFID signals. Comprehensive user experiments confirm the high security and usability of RF-Rhythm with false-positive and false-negative rates close to zero.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1824355
- PAR ID:
- 10402205
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
- ISSN:
- 1063-6692
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Commodity ultra-high-frequency (UHF) RFID authentication systems only provide weak user authentication, as RFID tags can be easily stolen, lost, or cloned by attackers. This paper presents the design and evaluation of SmartRFID, a novel UHF RFID authentication system to promote commodity crypto-less UHF RFID tags for security-sensitive applications. SmartRFID explores extremely popular smart devices and requires a legitimate user to enroll his smart device along with his RFID tag. Besides authenticating the RFID tag as usual, SmartRFID verifies whether the user simultaneously possesses the associated smart device with both feature-based machine learning and deep learning techniques. The user is considered authentic if and only if passing the dual verifications. Comprehensive user experiments on commodity smartwatches and RFID devices confirmed the high security and usability of SmartRFID. In particular, SmartRFID achieves a true acceptance rate of above 97.5% and a false acceptance rate of less than 0.7% based on deep learning. In addition, SmartRFID can achieve an average authentication latency of less than 2.21s, which is comparable to inputting a PIN on a door keypad or smartphone.more » « less
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Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology for automated identification of objects and people. RFID technology is expected to find extensive use in applications related to the Internet of Things, and in particular applications of Internet of Battlefield Things. Of particular interest are passive RFID tags due to a number of their salient advantages. Such tags, lacking energy sources of their own, use backscattering of the power of an RF source (a reader) to communicate. Recently, passive RFID tag-to-tag (T2T) communication has been demonstrated, via which tags can directly communicate with each other and share information. This opens the possibility of building a Network of Tags (NeTa), in which the passive tags communicate among themselves to perform data processing functions. Among possible applications of NeTa are monitoring services in hard-to-reach locations. As an essential step toward implementation of NeTa, we consider a novel multi-hop network architecture; in particular, with the proposed novel turbo backscattering operation, inter-tag distances can be significantly increased. Due to the interference among tags’ transmissions, one of the main technical challenges of implementing such the NeTa architecture is the routing protocol design. In this paper, we introduce a design of a routing protocol, which is based on a solution of a non-linear binary optimization problem. We study the performance of the proposed protocol and investigate impacts of several network factors, such as the tag density and the transmit power of the reader.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2022.3204204
