On the Practicality of UHF RFID Fingerprinting: How Real is the RFID Tracking Problem?

In this work, we demonstrate the practicality of people tracking by means of physical-layer fingerprints of RFID tags that they carry. We build a portable low-cost USRP-based RFID fingerprinter and we show, over a set of 210 EPC C1G2 tags, that this fingerprinter enables reliable identification of individual tags from varying distances and across different tag placements (wallet, shopping bag, etc.). We further investigate the use of this setup for clandestine people tracking in an example Shopping Mall scenario and show that in this scenario the mobility traces of people can be reconstructed with a high accuracy.