Seminar • Systems and Networking — RFID Hacking for Fun and Profit

Friday, October 19, 2018 2:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Ju Wang, Postdoctoral fellow
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are ubiquitous today due to their low cost (a few cents), relatively long communication range (7–11 m), ease of deployment, lack of battery, and small form factor. This talk shows how even hobbyists can transform commodity RFID tags into sensors by physically altering ('hacking') them using COTS sensors and a pair of scissors. Importantly, this requires no change to commercial RFID readers.

This talk also introduces a new legacy-compatible tag reading protocol called Differential Minimum Response Threshold (DMRT) that is robust to the changes in an RF environment. To validate the vision, the RFID-based sensors are developed for illuminance, temperature, gestures, etc. This approach has the potential to open up the field of batteryless backscatter-based RFID sensing to the research community, making it an exciting area for future work.


Bio: Ju Wang is a postdoc of Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. Currently, He is working with Prof. Abari and Keshav in the RF-based sensing area. His research interesting including Internet of Things (IoT), Mobile Systems and Wireless Networks.