Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office, reports that MIT researchers, working together with engineers from Texas Instruments, have developed a new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that is virtually impossible to hack.
“If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn’t steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and high-tech burglars couldn’t swipe expensive goods from a warehouse and replace them with dummy tags.”
Texas Instruments has built several prototypes of the new chip, to the researchers’ specifications, and in experiments the chips have behaved as expected. The researchers presented their research this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.
According to Chiraag Juvekar, a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT, the chip is designed to prevent so-called side channel attacks. Side-channel attacks analyze patterns of memory access or fluctuations in power usage when a device is performing a cryptographic operation, in order to extract its cryptographic key.
“The idea in a side-channel attack is that a given execution of the cryptographic algorithm only leaks a slight amount of information,” Juvekar says. “So you need to execute the cryptographic algorithm with the same secret many, many times to get enough leakage to extract a complete secret.”
“One way to thwart side-channel attacks is to regularly change secret keys. In that case, the RFID chip would run a random-number generator that would spit out a new secret key after each transaction. A central server would run the same generator, and every time an RFID scanner queried the tag, it would relay the results to the server, to see if the current key was valid.”
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