Speakers
- Peter Rombouts, NXP, Leuven, Belgium
The Future of RFID — Challenges, Security and Technological constraints
This presentation will give an introduction on the RFID landscape as it exists today and speculate on how this landscape could broaden in the near future. To illustrate a number of applications that could become important in the following years will be presented in more detail. Specific technological challenges of each application will be highlighted with a particular focus on the open issues towards their security, both on tag level as on the system level. After this introduction the audience should have a general feeling of the kind of security technologies that will be required on future RFID tags and the technical constraints of these tags will be explored. The sources giving rise to these technical constraints will be identified and their impact will be translated in terms of the classical design triangle: speed, size and power. The presentation will conclude with some closing remarks on the impact of security measures on the system complexity.
- Yael Maguire, ThingMagic, Boston, U.S.A.
It from Bit: An Overview of Passive RFID
Passive RFID is an emerging industry that promises to revolutionize the way
humans and computers interact with objects in the physical world. This technology is used
to “tag” objects with digital identities or sensor capabilities that can be read without
line of sight at ranges of 1mm to 20m in quantities of up to thousands per second pseudo
simultaneously. A brief overview of the applications of this technology will be presented
with a focus on the various frequencies deployed and protocol usage cases. The main
discussion will be on the communication protocols employed and physical characteristics
of the readers and tags in deployment settings. Due to the processing capabilities and
passive nature of the silicon in an RFID tag, the radio link between reader and tag is
highly asymmetric, unlike the wireless links of many commercial radio systems such as the
802.11 family, Bluetooth® and cellular family of standards. This asymmetry presents a
unique set of challenges on the design of readers and tags. Several of the design
challenges in protocols and tags concern reading and/or writing thousands of tags in
short time periods (by human perception), handling the significant amount of radio
interference inherently caused by using large numbers of readers and tags in the same
environment, economic and power constraints and privacy and security. For a single reader
and tag, the ultimate range limit of far-field passive RFID will be presented.
- Andrea Soppera, British Telecom, U.K.
Introduction on the RFID system landscape
This presentation will give an introduction on the RFID system landscape. We will discuss how RFID security can play a key role in Supply Chain Management and in the Internet of Things. In particular we will focus our overview on three key research challenges - (I) Securing data services by increasing control over data sharing with additional security mechanisms in passive RFID tags - (II) Collaborative Information Sharing need to have a service ecosystem for discovery and security - (III) Extracting knowledge from Supply Chain operations require trust and confidentiality among the various heterogeneous parties. These key research priorities will be presented in our service vision and then addressed with an overview on specific technology innovations that we have delivered in collaboration with our partners in the BRIDGE project.
Born and raised in Belgium, Peter Rombouts obtained his degree of M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (Burgerlijk Elektrotechnisch Ingenieur) at the K.U.Leuven (Belgium) in 2001. He worked at Banksys for 5 years, the company that operates the Belgian electronic payment system. There, he held the positions of Security Software Engineer and Security Architect. In 2006 he joined NXP Semiconductors, the former Philips Semiconductors, as a Security Architect in the Leuven Center of competence for cryptography and system security. His main assignments are in RFID and NFC security, lightweight cryptography and standardization.
Yael Maguire is a co-founder and CTO of
ThingMagic, Inc., a market
leader in bringing high performance, fixed, embedded, and networked
RFID readers to the global market. In his work at Thingmagic he co-developed
reader technology which now find uses in Ford Trucks and Lexmark printers.
Maguire completed his PhD at the MIT Media Laboratory in the area of near-field electromagnetic measurement
through his invention of a new type of sensor for molecular detection
using NMR. This innovation has many promising applications in biology
and chemistry. Maguire also holds a master's in Media Arts and
Sciences from MIT for his work towards scaling NMR quantum computing
to table-top systems, and an undergraduate degree from Queen's
University, Canada in Engineering Physics. While still a graduate
student, he co-founded Design that Matters (DtM), a course at MIT that
was designed to bring together engineering students to work on
technical challenges posed by NGOs and governments in order to improve
the quality of life for people in underserved communities around the
world. The DtM course has been adopted by other educational
institutions around the world, such as The Sristhi School of Design,
and its spirit flourishes in a NPO of the same name. Maguire's
contributions have been presented in numerous publications, such as
the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, and
his work has been featured in numerous press including the Boston
Globe and Wired Magazine. He has won numerous awards, most recently
being recognized as a Young Global Leader by the
World Economic Forum, a MassHighTech All-Star, and one of Technology
Review's “Top 35 innovators in the world under 35”.
Andrea Soppera is an Italian telecom engineer qualified at Eurecom Institut in Sophia Antipolis, specializing in corporate IP networks. Andrea has 10 years of experience in ICT technology. At the beginning of his career, he worked for a Software Radio company in California. Since then, he has held different positions within BT, covering event and content delivery capabilities, security (including cryptography and analysis of Denial of Services attacks) and new modes of communication, such as publish/subscribe or XML routing. In the last few years, Andrea has led an R&D program focused on RFID security within the
BRIDGE project, pursuing new service opportunities in the supply chain industry. Andrea is now leading the Future Communication Architecture program within BT with the aim to regulate both inter-provider peering agreements and control resource accountability at the edge of the carriers' network. The work involves contribution to standard group meetings such as IETF and ITU as well as management of
Trilogy, an FP7 EU project on Future Internet. Andrea has also recently received an Executive MBA degree from Cranfield School of Management.
