Thoughts on the security of future RFID electronic tags

With the expansion of applications, the security of RFID systems all over the world in the future may test people's wisdom just like the current network security problems.

Nowadays, a large number of digital identification cards such as credit cards, telephone cards, and financial IC cards have been closely related to people's daily life, and their applications have made various transactions more convenient and faster. However, most of these identification cards use magnetic stripe swiping cards or IC chips to make a contact connection with a card reader to read data information. In long-term use, it is easy to cause data identification errors due to wear and tear, and the contact identification card has a specific contact point, the card has directionality, and the convenience of operation needs to be improved.

In the 1990s, in response to the shortcomings of the contact identification system, an automatic identification technology, radio frequency identification (RFID), was gradually developed and gradually matured. It uses radio frequency for non-contact two-way communication to achieve the purpose of identifying and exchanging data.

最基本的RFID系统由三个部分组成: electronic tags, readers, and antennas. The tag is composed of a coupling element and a chip. The tag has a built-in antenna for communication with the radio frequency antenna; the reader is used to read or write tag information; the antenna is used to transmit radio frequency signals between the tag and the reader.

Since each electronic tag has a globally unique ID number-UID (UID is placed in the ROM when the chip is made, and cannot be modified or imitated), the data part can be securely managed by some encryption algorithms, readers and tags Mutual security authentication process can be set up between. Therefore, RFID technology has achieved rapid development in anti-counterfeiting and other applications, and has achieved certain breakthroughs.

First applied in document anti-counterfeiting

At present, RFID tags can be embedded in standard passport covers or documents in terms of passport anti-counterfeiting and electronic wallets. The chip also provides security functions and supports hardware encryption to ensure security. A considerable scale of applications has also been formed in this field in China, and the new era ID cards are being promoted and applied accordingly.

Followed by packaging anti-counterfeiting

The American manufacturer of anesthetics announced that it will use RFID on the medicine bottles to realize the electronic monitoring of the whole process of medicines from production to the pharmaceutical factory, to combat the growing phenomenon of drug fraud, and to manage and control the circulation of drugs. With the help of domestic manufacturers in the field of radio frequency identification, the Chinese government has also begun to try to use RFID technology to manage the production, transportation, and sales of drugs, food, and dangerous goods.

In the field of identification, traditional barcode technology is relatively mature and has been extremely widely used all over the world. As a method of computer data collection, bar code is widely used in various fields such as commodity circulation, automatic control, and file management with many advantages such as speed, accuracy, and low cost. It is also the most used data recognition method in my country.

However, because the traditional barcode is one-dimensional, it does not carry any information in the vertical direction, has low information density, and is easily rejected due to wear or wrinkles, which largely limits the application range of traditional barcodes.

The emergence of RFID technology has changed the way that barcode technology relies on "tangible" one-dimensional or two-dimensional geometric patterns to provide simple information. RFID provides information with a larger amount of data through its own chip, and the introduction of RFID technology is not only as simple as the increase of information capacity. From the perspective of data encryption, information transmission methods, and processing efficiency and accuracy, RFID is computer automatic identification. A revolution in technology.

RFID is easy to control and non-contact automatic identification characteristics, suitable for automatic control and harsh environment multi-target recognition, moving target recognition and other applications. And because the technology is difficult to be counterfeited or intruded, it has high security protection capabilities, and it is also used in the field of authenticity identification.

Texas Instruments, based on RFID technology, was once considered to be the world's most successful automotive electronic anti-theft system. Texas Instruments sales data show that at least 150 million sets of this system have been sold. Compared with the early electronic keys, this system is difficult to forge. However, several students from Johns Hopkins University in the United States cracked the security system. They claim that as long as the data is extracted from the real car electronic key through wireless communication, and after about an hour of calculation, the password of the electronic key can be deciphered.

In the future development of electronic tags, they will continue to improve along the direction of large capacity, high speed, smaller volume, lower price and being suitable for various applications. After solving the standardization problem, advancing the security legislation for RFID applications will play an important role in promoting the security application and market promotion of the technology.