Physical Layer Secuirty Techniques for RFID Systems

Abstract

The deployment of RFID technology in various applications is delayed due to the increased concerns over possible security breaches, especially in healthcare applications. For medical devices and applications, RFID and IoT technologies can improve the wellbeing of patients and reduce errors at hospitals, but the deployment of RFID is obstructed by multiple barriers including the security concerns. Previous research and studies have proved that traditional cryptography methods cannot be applied on RFID, due to the limited computational, storage and power resources in RFID tags and readers. These constraints emerged the novel idea of exploiting the characteristics of the physical layer to achieve information secrecy in RFID systems. In this thesis, two novel key-less physical layer based secrecy approaches have been developed and analyzed. In first approach a combined beamsteering and injected noise scheme is proposed, where beamsteering is exploited at the tag and the noise injection is exploited at the reader. The results show that this novel approach outperforms previous developed security scheme for RFID. Another novel approach is developed by implementing directional modulation (DM) techniques at the RFID reader while maintaining the simplicity of the tag’s circuity and processing capabilities.