The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags based on the Electronic Product Code (EPC) standard have been aggressively introduced into the global supply chain. These tags were designed as an upgrade to the familiar 14-digit Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode. Due to the low cost and limited energy budget available to these tags, it was traditionally considered impractical to apply any sort of cryptographic protection to these tags.

In this talk I will show how, contrary to previous claims of impracticality, EPC tags are capable of performing full-strength public-key encryption. The crucial element in our system is the WIPR encryption scheme, which enjoys a remarkably low resource footprint. We show how to use WIPR to provide high-security anti-counterfeiting functionality which respects user privacy, and show how WIPR tags and standard EPC tags can coexist and share the same infrastructure.

Joint work with Alex Arbit and Avishai Wool.

Bio:
Yossi Oren is a Ph.D. student at the Computer Network and Security Lab at Tel-Aviv University. His research interests are: Secure Hardware: Power analysis and other hardware attacks and countermeasures on cryptographic devices; Low-resource cryptographic constructions for lightweight computers such as RFID tags Cryptography in the real world: Consumer and voter privacy in the digital era; Web application security.