Nanostructured RFID technology: Attack-response and temperature-robustness investigations

Intensive experimental investigations on a newly-proposed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology are presented. This RFID technology is based on physical one-way functions or so-called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). It is mainly intended to provide some means for securing electronic chips using a simple method carried out during chip fabrication process. An RF passive device is utilized to generate such PUFs (or fingerprints) using near-field scattering information. Such device is meant to be an experimental prototype for verifying the functionality of the concept preceding the on-chip implementation stage. Temperature measurements are performed from -20°C up to 70°C in order to check system reliability under diverse environmental conditions. Attack-response is also investigated to check its capability of resisting physical tampering. Promising results are obtained in the frequency range of 10 MHz up to 15 GHz which verifies the reliability of the proposed technique.