| 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. |
