Wim Aerts

Dependence of RFID Reader Antenna Design on Read Out Distance

The design of a reader antenna is described for usage in radio frequency identification (RFID) systems at 13.56 MHz, as defined in the ISO-14443a standard. It presents the theory, with emphasis on the effect of the read out distance on the design, but also describes measurements on concrete designs to validate the formulas and statements. We also comment on practical problems that were encountered during the design process. The major contribution of this work is the generalization of the design theory for large read out distances where the conventional assumption of constant loop current no longer holds.

Conceptual Study of Analog Baseband Beam Forming: Design and Measurement of an Eight-by-Eight Phased Array

We report on the design and measurement of an eight-by-eight modular phased array that uses analog quadrature baseband phase shifters. The array is designed for 2.4 GHz and has a few MHz of bandwidth. Though for such frequency, bandwidth and number of elements, digital beam forming is still feasible with contemporary analog-to-digital converters (ADC), the design is a proof of concept for analog baseband beam forming and shows that this technique will work at frequencies and bandwidths beyond ADCs capabilities. Besides covering the architecture, implementation and the measurement of the array, the calibration is discussed extensively, as this is an inevitable step in activating the antenna.

A Practical Attack on KeeLoq

KeeLoq is a lightweight block cipher with a 32-bit block size and a 64-bit key. Despite its short key size, it is used in remote keyless entry systems and other wireless authentication applications. For example, there are indications that authentication protocols based on KeeLoq are used, or were used by various car manufacturers in anti-theft mechanisms. This paper presents a practical key recovery attack against KeeLoq that requires 216 known plaintexts and has a time complexity of 244.5 KeeLoq encryptions. It is based on the principle of slide attacks and a novel approach to meet-in-the-middle attacks.We investigated the way KeeLoq is intended to be used in practice and conclude that our attack can be used to subvert the security of real systems. In some scenarios the adversary may even reveal the master secret used in an entire class of devices from attacking a single device. Our attack has been fully implemented. We have built a device that can obtain the data required for the attack in less than 100 minutes, and our software experiments show that, given the data, the key can be found in 7.8 days of calculations on 64 CPU cores.

Case Study : A class E power amplifier for ISO-14443A

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a class E push-pull amplifier in order to increase the reading range of an ISO-14443A RFID system. With the aid of classical design formulas and some alterations due to parasitic and intrinsic capacitances, a working implementation was made that can provide the loop with an amplified modulated current wave.