Challenge: RFID Hacking for Fun and Profit

ABSTRACT

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are ubiquitous today due to their low cost (a few cents), relatively long communication range ($\sim$7-11~m), ease of deployment, lack of battery, and small form factor. Hence, they are an attractive foundation for environmental sensing. Although RFID-based sensors have been studied in the research literature and are also available commercially, manufacturing them has been a technically-challenging task that is typically undertaken only by experienced researchers. In this paper, we show how even hobbyists can transform commodity RFID tags into sensors by physically altering (`hacking') them using COTS sensors, a pair of scissors, and clear adhesive tape. Importantly, this requires no change to commercial RFID readers. We also propose a new legacy-compatible tag reading protocol called Differential Minimum Response Threshold (DMRT) that is robust to the changes in an RF environment. To validate our vision, we develop RFID-based sensors for illuminance, temperature, touch, and gestures. We believe that our approach has the potential to open up the field of batteryless backscatter-based RFID sensing to the research community, making it an exciting area for future work.

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Embedded and cyber-physical systems

    • Sensor networks