Soon, We’ll Have Hack-Proof RFID Chips in Our Pockets
With more of our belongings having smart chips built-in, the issue of security has naturally come to the forefront. From mobile phones to credit cards to debit cards to key cards – and all other sorts of items that require authentication – the risk of being hacked is always present.
And this kind of hacking doesn’t require physical contact – merely a wireless analysis of power fluctuations when the chip is being used.
Hence the popularity of RFID-blocking wallets and card holders.
Thanks to MIT and Texas Instruments researchers, however, we may have hack-proof RFID chips in the near future.
Yeah, we know that there is no such thing as 100% hack-proof, but according to Chiraag Juvekar, a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT and first author on the new paper, their solution involves preventing side-channel attacks (attacks which monitor the power fluctuations to get the cryptographic key) by having the hack-proof RFID chip regularly change the keys.
However, that solution isn’t enough to ensure the highest level of security. This system is still open to what is called a “power glitch” attack, wherein the power of the chip would be cut every time the secret key is generated. This would then allow hackers to run side-channel attacks over and over again to gain access.
To solve that issue, the researchers turned to two solutions.
One, a power supply built into the chip.
Two, “a set of “nonvolatile” memory cells that can store whatever data the chip is working on when it begins to lose power”.
All of the above – combined – result in a virtually hack-proof RFID chip which can very well be the standard in the future. As Ahmad Bahai, chief technology officer at Texas Instruments, says “In the age of ubiquitous connectivity, security is one of the paramount challenges we face. Because of this, Texas Instruments sponsored the authentication tag research at MIT that is being presented at ISSCC. We believe this research is an important step toward the goal of a robust, low-cost, low-power authentication protocol for the industrial Internet.”
