Secure RFID for the Critical Infrastructure

Abstract-

RFID plays an increasingly prominent role in the areas including Safety and Compliance, Real-time Asset Monitoring, Enhanced Asset Management, Streamlined Maintenance Operations, and Cost Optimization. They are also used in the national infrastructure including Airports, Smart Grid, Nuclear power plants, and Defense applications. Use of RFID in the national infrastructure requires its security to be of “Military grade” – above and beyond security for non-critical application.  The security challenges for RFID include Eavesdropping, Cloning and Spoofing, Unauthorized Access and Replay, Denial of Service (DoS), Privacy, and Electromagnetic Interference. Low cost and physical constraints of the devices are challenges to implementation of practical mitigation schemes, since for example, cryptographic solutions have to be lightweight.  This workshop aims to bring together subject matter experts from industry, government, and academia to present and discuss use of RFID in the critical infrastructure along with the necessary security properties, current security challenges, and how these can be mitigated.

Agenda-

Duration (in minutes) Description
10
Welcome and Opening
60
Speaker Presentations
20
Q/A and Discussions
90
Total Duration

Breakdown and suggested focus areas for the talks (75 minutes total)

Duration (in minutes) Description Speaker
15
Cybersecurity and RFID security challenges for the Energy Sector
Ann Dunkin
20
Challenges for practical cryptography and industry applications including RFID
Brian Degnan
15
Industrial perspective on RFID and its security
Michael Fein
25
Secure RFID for nuclear material inventory and facilities
Alessandro Cattaneo and Bernard Wishard
Workshop Chair: Arupjyoti (Arup) Bhuyan

Directorate Fellow and Director of Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Wireless Security Institute

Short Bio- 

 Dr. Arupjyoti (Arup) Bhuyan is the Director of the Wireless Security Institute (WSI) and a Directorate Fellow in the Idaho National Laboratory(INL). The focus of his research is on secure implementation of future generations of wireless communications with scientific exploration and engineering innovations across the fields of wireless technology, cybersecurity, and computational science. Specific goals are to lead and focus wireless security research efforts for 5G/6G and Wi-Fi 6E/7 with national impact, to secure 5G/6G spectrum sharing with distributed scheduling, and to secure cellular communication for a nationwide unmanned aerial system. 

Arup is currently the primary investigator (PI) of the 5G Threat Assessment program work in INL for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E) in the Department of Defense (DoD). He serves as a  Member of the Advisory Board in Platform for Open Wireless Data-driven Experimental Research (POWDER), in the University of Utah. 

Arup has extensive industry experience in wireless communications from his work before he joined INL in October 2015. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Sciences from Yale University. He is a senior member of IEEE.

Speakers:

Dr. Brian P. Degnan
Dr. Brian P. Degnan received degrees in Mechanical and Computer Engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2000 and 2003 respectively after a stint studying Computer Science at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013 with a research focus of subthreshold, temperature robust circuit architectures. He completed his Postdoc under Dr. Greg Durgin with the propagation group at Georgia Tech. Brian Degnan’s work on strong encryption for passively-powered RFID and IoT was sponsored Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, administered by Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Brian’s research focus is power-constrained processing and getting the most use out of the electron. His research interests include subthreshold asynchronous digital and reprogrammable architectures, as well as lightweight encryption implementations for power constrained systems. His recent area of research is early-node semiconductors. He is a serial entrepreneur who has taken several products from concept to sales, including video encoders and current measurement equipment.

Alessandro Cattaneo (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Alessandro Cattaneo is a full-time R&D Engineer in the Engineering Technology and Design division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He received his B.S. (2006), M.S. (2009) and Ph.D. (2013) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. He defended his M.S. thesis titled “Development, implementation and comparison of methodologies for acoustic sources localization. Numerical investigation and application to different practical cases” and the Ph.D. thesis titled “Sensor fusion and data analysis for structural health monitoring”. Dr. Cattaneo joined LANL in 2013. His research at LANL has spanned various fields, including: ultrasound-based fluid characterization devices for oil & gas industry applications; thermal-based and fiber Bragg gratings-based sensing devices for international nuclear safeguards applications; high-performance computing (HPC) risk-assessment numerical framework to evaluate seismic hazard of nuclear facilities; formulation of microgrid optimal dispatch algorithms to improve the reliability and resilience of electrical power grids; compressive sampling for structural health monitoring- and security-related applications; statistical assessment of radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment performance for nuclear material inventory and deployment of RFID technology in nuclear facilities. Dr. Cattaneo was co-recipient of the R&D 100 Award (2022) in the IT/Electrical category assigned to the “Additively Manufactured Tamper Evident Container” invention.
Michael Fein
Michael Fein is the Director of Product Management, RFID in Zebra Technologies. Michael Fein is responsible for the global product management of Zebra’s passive RFID portfolio of solutions. He has more than 15 years of experience in the RFID industry, with roles spanning R&D, Engineering, and Product Management. He became fascinated by RFID technology in 2003 while working for a global ink and coatings company where he was instrumental in developing the first high-speed printed RFID antennas. Since joining Zebra in 2006, he’s led numerous successful technology developments, product launches, and RFID deployments.

Ann Dunkin

Ann Dunkin most recently served as Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she managed the Department’s information technology (IT) portfolio and modernization; oversaw the Department’s cybersecurity efforts; led technology innovation and digital transformation; and enabled collaboration across the Department. She served in the Obama Administration as CIO of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prior roles include Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Dell Technologies; CIO, County of Santa Clara, CA; CTO, Palo Alto Unified School District, California; and various leadership roles at Hewlett Packard focused on engineering, research and development, IT, manufacturing engineering, software quality, and operations.

Ann is a published author, most recently of the book Industrial Digital Transformation, and a frequent speaker on topics such as government technology modernization, digital transformation, and organizational development. Ann was recently named to the Forbes CIO Next list 2024. She also received the 2024 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE) Captains of Industry Award and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology’s 2024 Pinnacle Award. She has been given a range of previous awards, including a 2024 Fed 100 Award, the 2022 Capital CIO Large Enterprise ORBIE Award, DC’s Top 50 Women in Technology for 2015 and 2016, ComputerWorld’s Premier 100 Technology Leaders for 2016, StateScoop’s Top 50 Women in Technology list for 2017, FedScoop’s Golden Gov Executive of the Year in 2016, 2021, 2022, 2023,and 2024 and FedScoop’s Best Bosses in Federal IT 2022. She was also named to Washington Exec’s Ones to Watch list for 2023.

Ms. Dunkin holds a Master of Science degree and a Bachelor of Industrial Engineering degree, both from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a licensed professional engineer in the states of California and Washington and an IISE Fellow. In 2018, she was inducted into Georgia Tech’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni and in 2024.

Bernard Wishard

Bernard Wishard is a consultant to US National Laboratories on nuclear technologies, safeguards and arms control policies, and cyber and physical security. From 2004 to 2023, Bernard was Section Head at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Department of Safeguards during which time the Agency received the Nobel Peace Prize. His Team provided complex security and verification services to over 250 Safeguards Inspectors. In response to attacks on IAEA systems, he created the Containment and Security Team which developed a multitude of cyber/physical solutions, novel containment systems, and mitigated vulnerabilities of all safeguards equipment. In 2022, he was awarded the Department’s Engineering Excellence for numerous security developments. Prior to the IAEA, he was a Senior Advisor to the Assistant of Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance for whom he developed arms control and nonproliferation verification methodologies. During this time, he received the Secretary of States’ Accommodation for extraordinary service representing the Bureau on numerous delegations  supporting Cooperative Threat Reductions (CTR) agreements and Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence (NSDD). He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Liverpool.