Development of RFID chip 'not hackable'

A "nearly impossible to hack" RFID chip has been successfully developed by researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments , providing a safer security measure for devices that use this chip as Credit cards, passports, . at the same time, promise to create powerful, cheap, low-cost internet security protocols in the future.

Previously it was discovered that RFID chips equipped with millions of US cards, passports, . which contained a lot of personal information of users but continuously emitted radio waves, could be Hackers take advantage and steal sensitive data of users such as names, nationalities, . without having to touch the item. Therefore, people began making more wallets that prevented RFID broadcasting or passport holders to limit this.

However, this solution by MIT and Texas Instruments is a completely new generation of RFID chips. According to Chiraag Juvekar, an electrical engineer at MIT, one of the study's authors said the new chip was designed to counter attack techniques called side channel attacks . This is a strong attack, model analysis and access to memory or system energy fluctuations used during cryptographic deployment, thereby extracting the key code.

Due to the integration of multiple capacitors and computational systems, it will operate slightly slower than conventional RFID chips.

According to Chiraag: "The idea in side channel attack is to implement an algorithm to monitor the coding process in order to obtain a very small amount of information . Therefore you need to implement a lot of decoding algorithms for the same information. A way to prevent this type of attack is to change the security code often, based on how it works, an RFID chip can run a random number generator to Create a new key sequence immediately after each transaction A central server will run the same number generator, and each time RFID scans a new query keyword, it will forward the scanned information to the server for verification. determine if the current lock chain is valid or not ".

However, this is still part of the problem and the old RFID chip system still suffers from the type of power tracking fluctuations in the process of generating code to extract information. At the same time, an attacker can still run thousands of times on the side channel attack to get the code. In particular, RFID tags that are not integrated with the power supply should be more vulnerable to attack. And so MIT's new RFID chip design is to integrate a power supply and continuously power the circuit, and a set of immutable cells to store data into the chip, which is activated immediately. when the chip starts to lose power.

With these two features, the team of researchers used special iron and iron crystals, which were arranged in a uniform 3-dimensional grid. In each grid contains one cell, and is insulated yin and yang, thereby creating a polarized power source. However, the polarization of these cells will be transformed into one of two directions depending on its application in the electric field and both can represent the value of a bit of information. When the electric field is lost, these cells still maintain its polarity to ensure the safety of the data.

One weakness of the new RFID chip is that because of the integration of multiple capacitors and computing systems, it will operate slightly slower than conventional RFID chips. However, the research team said that its speed still ensures most of RFID applications. At the same time, they argue that the new generation of chips not only contributes to enhance the security of RFID-based devices, but can also be used to create powerful, low-cost, low-cost security protocols. for the internet industry in the future.