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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.

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 onmore »commodity smartwatches and UHF RFID devices confirm the very high security and low authentication latency of WearRF-CLA.« less

Tag cloning and spoofing pose great challenges to RFID applications. This paper presents the design and evaluation of RCID, a novel system to fingerprint RFID tags based on the unique reflection coefficient of each tag circuit. Based on a novel OFDM-based fingerprint collector, our system can quickly acquire and verify each tag’s RCID fingerprint which are independent of the RFID reader and measurement environment. Our system applies to COTS RFID tags and readers after a firmware update at the reader. Extensive prototyped experiments on 600 tags confirm that RCID is highly secure with the authentication accuracy up to 97.15% and the median authentication error rate equal to 1.49%. RCID is also highly usable because it only takes about 8 s to enroll a tag and 2 ms to verify an RCID fingerprint with a fully connected multi-class neural network. Finally, empirical studies demonstrate that the entropy of an RCID fingerprint is about 202 bits over a bandwidth of 20 MHz in contrast to the best prior result of 17 bits, thus offering strong theoretical resilience to RFID cloning and spoofing.