Verayo plans to make copying of RFID Tags an impossible task

Filed in archive Companies on March 12, 2010

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Some feel that information delivered via RFID tags could pass onto wrong hands and this tends to inhibit its use on mass scale but Verayo, an MIT spinoff based in San Jose is working on making these tags cheaper and secure.

RFID tags deliver information via radio waves and many are not comfortable with this whole concept. Cryptography takes care of this problem but addition of cryptographic circuits to the chips tends to push up the costs. The chips of Verayo are based on the security concept which says that no two chips are alike. It further says that components of computer circuit are measured in billionths of a meter therefore a stray atom during manufacturing may lead the wire to turn out slightly thinner or thicker as compared to the specifications. As a result this leads to very small variations on how quick the circuit works and nothing could be carried out for its prevention.

Since it could not be prevented therefore the company decided to make the most of it. Depending on the physical variations, the signal traveling through a simple circuit tends to go quicker or slower. If a number of signals are sent through and it's measured as to how fast they can travel, strings of numbers which are distinctive to each circuit are generated. This process is termed as Physical Unclonable Function or PUF.

Here the string turns out to be the base for a number of mathematical equations. Whenever you enter an input and run it through a secret equation one can derive specific output based on the equation but then the same output leads to different outputs on different chips. A thief cannot duplicate it as he can't generate a chip which has the same PUF as another one but this does not mean that PU Circuits are foolproof as some genius could beat the system by laying their hands on the challenge response pairs if they are not kept secured.

On the whole this technology seems promising for authentication purposes.