All slides © 2006 RSA Laboratories

RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentication)

takes many forms…

 “RFID” really denotes a
spectrum of devices

Basic
“smart Toll payment Automobile
label” plaque ignition key Mobile phone

passive semi-passive passive

no crypto no crypto some crypto

few cm to several meters several cm

few meters range range
range
 “Smart labels”:
EPC (Electronic Product Code) tags

Barcode EPC tag

Fast, automated
scanning
Line-of-sight Radio contact

Specifies object type Uniquely specifies object Provides pointer

to database entry
for every object,
i.e., unique,
detailed history
2030: Week in the life of a milk carton

• 30 April: RFID-tagged cow “Bessie” produces milk

• 30 April: Milk transferred to RFID-tagged tank
– Cow identity and milking time recorded in tank-tag database
• 1 May: RFID portal on truck records loading of refrigeration tanks
– Truck also has active RFID (+GPS) to track geographical location and RFID transponder to pay tolls

• 2 May: Chemical-treatment record written to database record for milk barrel

– Bessie’s herd recorded to have consumed bitter grass; compensatory sugars added
• 3 May: Milk packaged in RFID-tagged carton; milk pedigree recorded in database associated with carton tag

• 4 May: RFID portal at supermarket loading dock records arrival of carton

• 5 May: “Smart” shelf records arrival of carton in customer area
• 5 May 0930h: “Smart” shelf records removal of milk
• 5 May 0953h: Point-of-sale terminal records sale of milk (to Alice)
2030: Week in the life of a milk carton

• 6 May 0953h: Supermarket transfers carton tag ownership to Alice’s smart

home
• 6 May 1103h: Alice’s refrigerator records arrival of milk
• 6 May 1405h: Alice’s refrigerator records removal of milk; refrigerator looks up database-recorded pedigree and displays:
“Woodstock, Vermont, Grade A, light pasturization, artisanal, USDA organic, breed: Jersey, genetic design #81726 ”

• 6 May 1807h: Alice’s “smart” home warns domestic robot that milk has been left out of refrigerator for more than four hours
• 6 May 1809h: Alice’s refrigerator records replacement of milk

• 7 May 0530h: Domestic robot uses RFID tag to locate milk in refrigerator; refills baby bottle
2030: Week in the life of a milk carton

• 6 May 0953h: Supermarket transfers carton tag ownership to Alice’s smart

home
• 6 May 1103h: Alice’s refrigerator records arrival of milk
• 6 May 1405h: Alice’s refrigerator records removal of milk; refrigerator looks up database-recorded pedigree and displays:
“Woodstock, Vermont, Grade A, light pasturization, artisanal, USDA organic, breed: Jersey, genetic design #81726 ”

• 6 May 1807h: Alice’s “smart” home warns domestic robot that milk has been left out of refrigerator for more than four hours
• 6 May 1809h: Alice’s refrigerator records replacement of milk

• 7 May 0530h: Domestic robot uses RFID tag to locate milk in refrigerator; refills baby bottle

• 7 May 0531h: Robot discards carton; “Smart” refrigerator notes absence of milk; transfers order to Alice’s
PDA/phone/portable server grocery list

• 7 May 2357h: Recycling center scans RFID tag on carton; directs carton to paper-brick recycling substation
 RFID Today: IN Your POcket
Note: Often just emit static identifiers, i.e., they are just smart labels!

Proximity cards
 in your pocket
RFID helps secure hundreds of millions of automobiles
•Cryptographic challenge-response
•Philips claims more than 90% reduction in car theft thanks to RFID!
•Note: some devices, e.g., Texas Instruments DST, are weak (Bono et al.)…

Automobile ignition keys

 in your pocket
•RFID now offered in all major credit cards in U.S.…
•“Vulnerabilities in First-Generation RFID-Enabled Credit Cards”
•T. Heydt-Benjamin, D. Bailey, K. Fu, A. Juels, and T. O’Hare
•Many cards not doing challenge-response
•Some cards leaking cleartext bearer names and card numbers!

Payment devices
 In Currency?

• Talk in 2003-4 of planting RFID tags in 10,000 Yen

banknotes and Euro banknotes
• Talk has dissipated
• Main interest: anti-counterfeiting
 in ANIMALs
“Not Really Mad”
• Cattle

The cat came back,

the very next day…
• Housepets
50 million+
 on People

• Schools
• Amusement parks
• Hospitals
• In the same vein: mobile phones with GPS…
 The consumer privacy problem
Here’s Wig
Replacement hip model #4456
Mr. Jones medical part #459382 (cheap
polyester)
in 2030…

Das Kapital and

Communist-
party handbook

1500 Euros
in wallet
Serial numbers:
30 items 597387,389473
of lingerie …
 …and the tracking problem
Wig
serial #A817TS8

• Mr. Jones pays with a credit card; his RFID tags now linked to his
identity; determines level of customer service
– Think of car dealerships using drivers’ licenses to run credit checks…
• Mr. Jones attends a political rally; law enforcement scans his
RFID tags
• Mr. Jones wins Turing Award; physically tracked by paparazzi via
RFID
 The authentication problem
Good readers, bad tags

Mr. Jones in 2030

Counterfeit!

Replacement hip
medical part #459382
Mr. Jones’s car is stolen!

1500 Euros
in wallet
Mad-cow Serial numbers:
hamburger 597387,389473
lunch Counterfeit! …
Won’t crypto solve our problems?
Side-channel countermeasures
AES
We can do:
• Challenge-response for
authentication
• Mutual authentication
and/or encryption for
privacy
But:
1. Moore’s Law vs. pricing pressure
2. Basic cryptography is not a cure-all…
This is the theme of our talk!
 Simple key management:
Possession is 9/10ths of law
• How does Alice’s refrigerator get read/write privileges for
the history for the milk carton bearing tag T?
• The straightforward approach:
– A central registry R shares symmetric key k with the tag T
– Alice’s refrigerator acts as authentication proxy between R and T
– Tag T authenticates via challenge-response

c c

k r = fk(c) r = fk(c) k

Registry R
 Simple key management:
Possession is 9/10ths of law
• But what if the tag is on Alice’s
wristwatch?
– Should any nearby reader be able to read tag
history?
– Should any nearby reader be able to modify
tag history?
• What if registry R is unavailable?
– Will the tag carry information on board?
– If so, who can access it?
– Does Alice’s baby get its milk?
The VeriChip TM

+ = ???
Human-implantable RFID
 The VeriChip TM

• Proposed for medical-patient identification

• Also proposed and used as an authenticator for
physical access control, a “prosthetic biometric”
– E.g., Mexican attorney general purportedly used for

+ =
access to secure facility
• What kind of cryptography does it have?
– None: It can be easily cloned
• So shouldn’t we add a challenge-response
protocol? Human-implantable RFID
• Cloning may actually be a good thing
 The VeriChip TM

• Physical coercion and attack

– In 2005, a man in Malaysia had his fingertip cut off by
thieves stealing his biometric-enabled Mercedes
– What would happen if the VeriChip were used to
access ATM machines and secure facilities?
• Perhaps it is better then if tags can be cloned
and are not used for authentication—only for
identification
• But if a tag is cloneable, and used for
identification, does that mean that privacy is
impossible?
– I.e., does cloneability imply an ability to track?
 Private identification
• A very simple scheme allows for
simultaneous cloneability and privacy
• El Gamal public-key cryptosystem:
– Randomized scheme: C = EPK,r [m]
– Semantic security: Cannot distinguish between
ciphertexts C and C’ on known plaintexts without
knowledge of SK
• Adversary cannot distinguish between
C = EPK,r [Alice] and C’ = EPK,r’ [Bob]
 Private identification
Our simple scheme:

Officer “Who are you?” SK

Alice

C=E
r [Alice]
PK,

“Proceed to
authenticate
Officer Alice”
 Private identification
Take two:

Officer “Who are you?” SK

Alice

C’ = E
PK,
r’ [Alice]
“Proceed to
authenticate
Officer Alice”
 Private identification
• Semantic security → An attacker who intercepts C
and C’ cannot tell if they come from the same chip
– Attacker cannot identify or track Alice
• But attacker can still clone Alice’s chip!
• El Gamal re-encryption (homomorphism):
– Let U = EPK,r [1] have uniformly random r
– Then given C = EPK,r’ [m], the distribution CxU is uniform
over ciphertexts on m
• Clone chip selects U and outputs CxU
• Clone chip is indistinguishable from Alice’s!
Attacker’s perspective

Alice’s
chip “Who are you?”

C
 Attacker’s perspective

“Who are you?”

CxU

“Proceed to
authenticate
Attacker can simulate Alice’s chip, but…
•He cannot track Alice Officer Alice”
•He may not even know whose chip he’s cloned!
 The covert-channel problem
Suppose there is a secret sensor…

Officer “Who are you?” SK

Alice

“Officer Alice
has low blood
pressure and
high blood-alcohol”
 The covert-channel problem
Suppose there is a secret sensor…

Officer “Who are you?” SK

Alice

“Officer Alice
recently passed near
the RFID reader of a
casino”
 The covert-channel problem
Suppose there is a secret sensor…

Officer “Who are you?” SK

Alice

“Mercury switch
indicates that Officer
Alice took a nap
this afternoon.”
 How can we ensure no covert
channels?
• Must make outputs deterministic
• Can also, e.g., give PRNG keys to Alice
• But can we:
– Allow Alice to verify covert-freeness without
exposing secret keys to her?
– Enable a third party to verify covert-freeness?
• It turns out that privacy and such verifiable
covert-freeness are contradictory!
Covert-freeness detector

A “No covert
channel”
A’
“Yes, covert
channel
suspected”
 Here’s a covert channel!
1. Create identifier for Bob
• Bob need not actually own a chip
2. Alice’s chip does following:
• If no nap, output ciphertexts A, A’, A’’,
etc. with Alice’s identity
• If Alice has taken a nap, then flip to
Bob’s identity, i.e., output ciphertexts
A, A’…B’,B’’
Suppose we detect
the covert channel…

A
“No covert
channel”

A’
Suppose we detect
the covert channel…

A
“Yes, covert
channel
B suspected”
Then we can distinguish between
Alice and Bob: Privacy is broken!

A
“Yes, covert
channel
B suspected”
Then we can distinguish between
Alice and Bob: Privacy is broken!

A
“A and B
represent
different
B
people”
 Covert-freeness and privacy?
• Let’s change (relax) the definition of privacy!
• If non-sequential tag outputs are checked, detector learns nothing…

READ EVENTS

“?????”
 Covert-freeness and privacy?
• Detector can do pairwise check only…
• Achievable “efficiently” with pairings-based cryptography
(ECC)

READ EVENTS

“Covert-free pair”
 Covert-freeness and privacy?
• Privacy is largely preserved because of locality
– Can only correlate events in immediate succession
• Covert-freeness checkable probabilistically, i.e., with spot checks

READ EVENTS

“Covert-free pair”
 A sobering thought:
Suppose we can achieve privacy…
• Y. Oren and A. Shamir attacked EPC kill passwords via over-the-
air power analysis
• Found that dead tags are detectable!
– Backscatter from antennas
• Hypothesize manufacturer type may be learnable

•3 type A tags (merchandise)

•2 type B tags (medication)
•10 type C tags (500-Euro banknotes)

• Probably of limited significance, but still bears on privacy

• Do tags possess uniquely detectable RF fingerprints?
– Device signatures a staple of electronic warfare
• Cryptography would not help here!
 Some caveats
• Some of talk really in outer limits, but basic caveats are
important:
– Pressure to build a smaller, cheaper tags without cryptography
– RFID tags are close and personal, giving privacy a special
dimension
– RFID tags change ownership frequently
– Key management will be a major problem
• Think for a moment after this talk about distribution of kill
passwords…
• Are there good hardware approaches to key distribution, e.g.,
proximity as measure of trust
• Straightforward crypto is not always the answer!
• Cryptography is still important
– Urgent need for cheaper hardware for primitives and better side-
channel defenses
 To Learn More:
RFID CUSP
• RFID ConsortiUm for Security and Privacy
– Collaboration among Johns Hopkins, RSA Laboratories, and UMass-
Amherst
– www.rfid-cusp.org
• Papers:
– “RFID security and privacy: a research survey”
– “Vulnerabilities in First-Generation RFID-Enabled Credit Cards”
• Joint work with T. Heydt-Benjamin, D. Bailey, K. Fu, and T. O’Hare
– “Security Analysis of a Cryptographically-Enabled RFID Device”
• Joint work with S. Bono, M. Green, A. Stubblefield, A. Rubin, and M. Szydlo
– “The security implications of VeriChipTM cloning,”
• Joint work with J. Halamka, A. Stubblefield, and J. Westhues
– “Covert channels in privacy-preserving identification systems”
• Forthcoming work

– “Power analysis of RFID tags” (on Internet; not RFID-CUSP)

• Y. Oren and A. Shamir