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NFChain: A Practical Fingerprinting Scheme for NFC Tag Authentication | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

NFChain: A Practical Fingerprinting Scheme for NFC Tag Authentication


Abstract:

NFC tag authentication is highly demanded to avoid tag abuse. Recent fingerprinting methods employ the physical-layer signal, which embeds the tag hardware imperfections ...Show More

Abstract:

NFC tag authentication is highly demanded to avoid tag abuse. Recent fingerprinting methods employ the physical-layer signal, which embeds the tag hardware imperfections for authentication. However, existing NFC fingerprinting methods suffer from either low scalability for a large number of tags or incompatibility with NFC protocols, impeding the practical application of NFC authentication systems. To fill this gap, we propose NFChain, a new NFC fingerprinting scheme that excavates the tag hardware uniqueness from the protocol-agnostic tag response signal. Specifically, we harness an agile and compatible frequency band of NFC to extract the tag fingerprint from a chain of tag responses over multiple frequencies, which significantly improves fingerprint scalability. However, extracting the desired fingerprint encounters two practical challenges: (1) fingerprint inconsistency under different NFC reader and tag configurations and (2) fingerprint variations across multiple measurements of the same tag due to the signal noise in generic readers. To tackle these challenges, we first design an effective nulling method to eliminate the effect of device configurations. Second, we employ contrastive learning to reduce fingerprint variations for accurate authentication. Extensive experiments show we can achieve as low as 3.7% FRR and 4.1% FAR for over 600 tags.
Date of Conference: 17-20 May 2023
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 29 August 2023
ISBN Information:

ISSN Information:

Conference Location: New York City, NY, USA

Funding Agency:


I. Introduction

Near-field communication (NFC) has now become a critical data exchange approach in wireless communication, which has widespread adoption in industries and people's daily lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has been further accelerating such contact-free communication in commercial scenarios in terms of packaging, tracking, and anti-counterfeiting [1]- [3]. The global NFC market size was valued at 15 billion in 2019 and is estimated to experience significant growth and reach over 54 billion by 2028 [4], [5]. Such prosperity of the NFC market facilitates its versatility for more commercial use.

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References

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