Securing RFID with Ultra-wideband Modulation

Current implementations of secure RFID rely on digital cryptographic primitives in the form of hashes and block ciphers. The presence of these blocks is motivated by privacy requirements, but they increase the overall processing latency, the power consumption, and the silicon area budget of the RFID tag. In addition, existing passive RFID systems rely on simple coding and modulation schemes using narrowband radio frequencies, which can be easily eavesdropped or jammed. We propose to implement the link from RFID to reader using ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. We show that the use of an advanced modulation scheme offers a new approach to the secure RFID problem. By using the modulation spreading code as a secret parameter of the communications link, we can make eavesdropping extremely difficult and increase the communication reliability. We also show that it decreases the latency and the risk for side-channel attacks. We present the digital baseband architecture of a passive UWB-RFID that uses time-hopped pulse-position modulation (TH-PPM), and present areaand power estimates that are competitive to solutions using digital cryptography.

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