Butterfly: Environment-Independent Physical-Layer Authentication for Passive RFID

RFID tag authentication is challenging because most commodity tags cannot run cryptographic algorithms. Prior research demonstrates that physical layer information based authentication is a promising solution, which uses special features from the physical backscatter signals from tags as their fingerprints. However, our recent studies show that existing physical-layer authentication may fail if feature collection and authentication are conducted in different locations, due to location-dependent noises, environmental factors, or reader hardware differences. This paper presents a new physical layer authentication scheme, called Butterfly, which is resilient to environment and location changes. Butterfly utilizes a pair of adjacent tags as an identifier of each object. By using the difference between the RF signals of the two tags as their fingerprint, the environmental factors can be effectively canceled. Butterfly is fully compatible with commodity RFID systems and standards. We set up a prototype Butterfly using commodity readers, tags, and RF devices. Extensive experiments show that Butterfly achieves high authentication accuracy for substantially different environments and device changes.