Scientists from MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new type of RFID chip, i.e., a Radio Frequency Identification chip, which helps to improve the security of your credit cards, key cards, and warehouse goods and is almost impossible to hack.
This RFID chip has been designed to prevent ‘Side Channel Attacks.’ Side channel attacks are those where inconstancy in power and memory accessing patterns are analyzed while the device is operating to accumulate information about the Cryptographic Key (a piece of information/ parameter to determine the Cryptographic algorithm).
Chirag Juvekar, an MIT engineer, said, “The idea of a side-channel attack is that a given execution of the Cryptographic Algorithm only leaks a slight amount of information. So you need to execute the Cryptographic algorithm with the same secret many, many times to get enough leakage to extract a complete secret.”
Changing Secret keys periodically is also one way to stop side-channel attacks. In that case, the RFID chip will run a random number generator, generating a new secret key after each transaction. After that, a central server will run as the same generator and then RFID scanner will check the tag, it will transmit results to the server to check whether the current key is valid.
Such a system remains accessible to a ‘Power Glitch Attack’ in which the power of the RFID chip is often cut before it changes its secret key. An attacker could now attack thousands of attacks by running the same side channel with the same key.
According to MIT, “Power glitch attacks have been used to avoid limits on the number of incorrect password entries in the password protected devices but RFID tags are particularly accessible to them since they are charged by tag readers and have no onboard power supplies.”
There are two design innovations that allow MIT scientists to stop power-glitch attacks: the first one is an on-chip power supply whose connection to the chip circuitry would be impossible to cut, and the other is a set of ‘non-volatile’ memory cells that can store any data, the chip will start working when it begins to lose power.
Juvekar and Anantha Chadrakasan, electrical engineering and computer science professors, used a special kind of material known as ‘Ferroelectric Crystals’ for these features.
Big chip makers already use Ferroelectric Crystals to produce non-volatile memory or computer memory that grasps data when it’s powered off.
The research team has collaborated with Texas Instruments to build several prototypes of the new hack-proof RFID chip. The first presentation of this research was at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
