Sensory-data-enhanced authentication for RFID-based access control systems

Access card authentication is critical and essential for many modern access control systems, which have been widely deployed in various government, commercial and residential environments. However, due to the static identification information exchange among the access cards and access control clients, it is very challenging to fight against access control system breaches due to reasons such as loss, stolen or unauthorized duplications of the access cards. Although advanced biometric authentication methods such as fingerprint and iris identification can further identify the user who is requesting authorization, they incur high system costs and access privileges can not be transferred among trusted users. In this work, we introduce a sensory-data-enhanced authentication for access control systems. By combining sensory-data obtained from onboard sensors on the access cards as well as the original encoded identification information, we are able to effectively tackle the problems such as access card loss and stolen. Our solution is backward-compatible with existing access control systems and significantly increases the key spaces for authentication. We theoretically demonstrate the potential key space increases with simple sensor data and empirically demonstrate simple rotations can increase key space by more than 30, 000 times with an authentication accuracy of 95%. We performed extensive simulations under various environment settings and implemented our design on WISP to experimentally verify the system performance.