Accurate UHF Tag Authentication Using Near-Field Capabilities

As the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) passive Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology becomes widespread, it faces various challenges of security attacks due to the inherent characteristics of the design of tag hardware and communication protocol. Recently, physical-layer identification methods are proved to be promising to validate the authenticity of passive tags. However, existing methods are usually highly location-dependent and susceptible to environment variations. This paper presents a new authentication solution, namely SecurArray, that involves analyzing the coupling among tags, profiling the communication signal, and conducting the feature matching. SecurArray deploys an array of tags in close proximity as the identity of an object and utilizes the near-field capability of UHF tags for authentication. We implement our prototype using commercial off-the-shelf UHF RFID reader and tags. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that SecurArray effectively achieves high accuracy of physical-layer authentication.