RFID Hacking for Fun and Profit

This paper shows how even hobbyists can transform commodity RFID tags into sensors by physically altering ("hacking") them using COTS sensors, a pair of scissors, and clear adhesive tape or conductive epoxy glue. Importantly, this requires no change to commercial RFID readers. We also propose a signal feature, namely Differential Minimum Response Threshold (DMRT), which is robust to the changes in an RF environment for the sensing. To validate our vision, we develop RFID-based sensors for features such as illuminance, temperature, and gestures. We believe our approach can open up the field of batteryless backscatter-based RFID sensing to the research community, making it an exciting area for future work.