1GenePrint: Generic and Accurate Physical-Layer Identification for UHF RFID Tags

Abstract—Physical-layer identification utilizes unique features of wireless devices as their fingerprints, providing authentic-ity and security guarantee. Prior physical-layer identification techniques on RFID tags require non-generic equipments and are not fully compatible with existing standards. In this pa-per, we propose a novel physical-layer identification system, GenePrint, for UHF passive tags. The GenePrint prototype system is implemented by a commercial reader, a USRP-based monitor, and off-the-shelf UHF passive tags. Our solution is generic and completely compatible with the existing standard, EPCglobal C1G2 specification. GenePrint leverages the internal similarity among pulses of tags ’ RN16 preamble signals to extract a hardware feature as the fingerprint. We conduct extensive experiments on over 10,000 RN16 preamble signals from 150 off-the-shelf RFID tags. The results show that GenePrint achieves a high identification accuracy of 99.68%+. The feature extraction of GenePrint is resilient to various malicious attacks, such as the feature replay attack. Index Terms—RFID, physical-layer identification, similarity I