Authenticated RF Seals

The Argus Seal is a low-cost replacement for Copper-Brass and Cobra Seals that offers the capability of insitu verification; thereby dramatically reducing both the life-cycle cost of using the seal as well as the timedelay from removal to verification and thus increasing the credibility of the Safeguards process. The Argus seal is an electrical equivalent of the popular Cobra seal, with a multi-stranded high resistivity wire replacing the Cobra seal’s multi-stranded fiber-optic cable. The seal is interrogated without contact or connection through a low-power radio link to a familiar VACOSS-like reader. A re-usable Argus seal is now ready for field testing. The Argus seal was developed for this purpose by Aquila Technologies Group, Inc. (Aquila), in the USA, and Hi-G-Tek, Ltd. in Israel, with partial funding from the BIRD Foundation. To extend the functionality of the Argus Seal, the next step in the development is to provide cryptographic authentication of the data that is output by the Argus seal. The authentication will provide assurance that the seal data originates from the correct original seal and that the data has not been tampered while in storage since original acquisition. Addition of authentication will be accomplished in two ways. The first is the protection of the RF communication link by using the well-known 3DES technique. The 3DES approach is based on private keys that are used by the system components. When the components in the system are communicating with each other they transfer the signatures generated by the private keys together with the data. The second is the protection of the seal data by integrating the DS1954 CryptoButton from Dallas Semiconductor into the seal. This passive chip incorporates 286,000 transistors dedicated to the cryptography functions of modular exponentiation and prime number generation. Among many other functions, the DS1954 provides an encapsulated method for adding authentication to the data stream.