Emulation-based fault analysis on RFID tags for robustness and security evaluation

This paper presents an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) based fault emulation system for analysis of fault impact on security and robustness of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. This emulation system that deals with any RFID protocol consists of two tag-reader pairs, a fault injection module and an emulation controller all implemented in a single FPGA. The designed approach performs single event upset (SEU) and single event transient (SET) fault injection and permits with high flexibility to set communication scenarios and related parameters. Moreover, we propose a classification of produced errors to evaluate fault impacts and identify most sensitive tag flip-flops causing large number of failures and security concerns. The proposed fault injection approach provides suitable means to increase tags' security and robustness. In our experimentation campaign, an ultra-high frequency (UHF) tag architecture has been exposed to intensive SEU and SET fault injections. The duration of the campaign including results analysis is 30 min in where 6,215,316 faults are experimented. Our results have shown that the tag has tolerated 61.82% of SEUs and 67.83% of SETs. The flip-flops that constitute the tag FSM (finite state machine) have been identified as the most sensitive parts causing large number of failures.