Search

The fifth-generation (5G) network is presented as one of the main options for Industry 4.0 connectivity. Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) is the 5G service category used by critical mechanisms, with a millisecond end-to-end delay and reduced probability of failure. 5G defines new numerologies, together with mini-slots for a faster scheduling. The main challenge of this is to select the appropriate numerology according to radio conditions. This fact is very important in industrial scenarios, where the fundamental problems are interference and multipath propagation, due to the presence of concrete walls and large metallic machinery and structures. Therefore, this paper is focused on analyzing the impact of the numerology selection on the delay experienced at radio link level for a remote-control service. The study, which has been carried out in a simulated cellular factory environment, has been performed for different packet sizes and channel conditions, focusing on outliers. Evaluation results show that not always a higher numerology, with a shorter slot duration, is appropriate for this type of service, particularly under Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions.

The National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security published in 2012 by the White House identifies two primary goals for strengthening global supply chains: first, to promote the efficient and secure movement of goods, and second to foster a resilient supply chain. The Internet of Things (IoT), and in particular Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, can be used to realize these goals. For product identification, tracking and real-time awareness, RFID tags are attached to goods. As tagged goods move along the supply chain from the suppliers to the manufacturers, and then on to the retailers until eventually they reach the customers, two major security challenges can be identified: (I) to protect the shipment of goods that are controlled by potentially untrusted carriers; and (II) to secure the transfer of ownership at each stage of the chain. For the former, grouping proofs in which the tags of the scanned goods generate a proof of "simulatenous" presence can be employed, while for the latter, ownership transfer protocols (OTP) are used. This paper describes enhanced security solutions for both challenges. We first extend earlier work on grouping proofs and group codes to capture resilient group scanning with untrusted readers; then, we describe a modified version of a recently published OTP based on channels with positive secrecy capacity adapted to be implemented on common RFID systems in the supply chain. The proposed solutions take into account the limitations of low cost tags employed in the supply chain, which are only required to generate pseudorandom numbers and compute one-way hash functions., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

RFID ownership transfer protocols (OTPs) transfer tag ownership rights. Recently, there has been considerable interest in such protocols; however, guaranteeing privacy for symmetric-key settings without trusted third parties (TTPs) is a challenge still unresolved. In this paper, we address this issue and show that it can be solved by using channels with positive secrecy capacity. We implement these channels with noisy tags and provide practical values, thus proving that perfect secrecy is theoretically possible. We then define a communication model that captures spatiotemporal events and describe a first example of symmetric-key based OTP that: (i) is formally secure in the proposed communication model and (ii) achieves privacy with a noisy tag wiretap channel without TTPs., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This paper analyzes the cryptographic security of J3Gen, a promising pseudo random number generator for low-cost passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Although J3Gen has been shown to fulfill the randomness criteria set by the EPCglobal Gen2 standard and is intended for security applications, we describe here two cryptanalytic attacks that question its security claims: (i) a probabilistic attack based on solving linear equation systems; and (ii) a deterministic attack based on the decimation of the output sequence. Numerical results, supported by simulations, show that for the specific recommended values of the configurable parameters, a low number of intercepted output bits are enough to break J3Gen. We then make some recommendations that address these issues.