Vehicle license plates with embedded ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags are being deployed in Honduras and the Cayman Islands. The plates will help the two countries to identify vehicles and, in some cases, track their movements on highways and other roads. In addition, the Philippines Ministry of Transport this week commissioned the same system for all of its vehicles.
The IDePlate, provided by Tönnjes E.A.S.T., is an aluminum license plate with an NXP Semiconductors UCODE DNA chip embedded by Tönnjes. The company also makes and sells an IDeSTIX adhesive RFID windshield sticker, which leverages the same UCODE DNA chip. The IDeSTIX uniquely identifies the vehicle itself, and can be paired with the IDePlate to detect whether a license plate has been fraudulently attached.
In 2014, the technology was tested during a field trial at the Dutch Ministry of Defense’s Driving Education and Training Facility in Oirschot (see Tönnjes, Kirpestein and NXP Complete Yearlong Vehicular ID Field Trial). Since then, it has been deployed in Honduras, where tags are being attached to new vehicle plates as part of a two-year rollout. The system is already in use in the Cayman Islands, with pilots currently under way in Russia and Turkey.
The RFID-enabled plate is designed to be forgery-proof, says Jochen Betz, Tönnjes’ managing director. The UCODE DNA IC uses cryptographic authentication based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Each time a tag is interrogated, it generates a new AES calculation based on its unique crypto key, which the reader receives and is programmed to verify. That ID number can then be linked to data about the vehicle and registration in a database.
By using both the IDePlate and IDeStix, the system enables users to identify any misuse of license plates. The problem with plate identification alone, the company explains, is that it cannot detect if the wrong plate is attached to a car. “Plate theft is very difficult to avoid,” Betz states, so the IDeStix provides a level of redundancy. The IDeStix is a hologram-printed windshield sticker that is placed on the window’s interior.
The RFID-enabled sticker can be interrogated simultaneously with the plate tag, and can then respond with its own encrypted code that is linked to the vehicle’s information. Tönnjes sells the RFID-enabled blank or finished plates to government agencies and offers equipment to emboss a plate number. They can then use their own software to link each tag’s encoded RFID number with the plate ID.
To date, Honduras has acquired 3 million sets of plates and stickers, which are being rolled out in its two-year replacement effort. The government plans to seek fixed RFID readers that will be deployed on some public roads, as well as RFID readers for mobile applications. The country intends to install those devices at several checkpoints, where it will capture both license plate and windshield IDs and confirm that they match.
If a specific vehicle is a subject of interest with regard to some illegal activity, the system can be set to seek its windshield and plate ID numbers, and to prompt an alarm at that checkpoint when the reader interrogates the tag ID, for use by public-safety officers stationed there. The tag IDs can be read at border crossings and toll gates as well, and could be used to identify speeding events and link a particular speed with a specific vehicle.
In the Cayman Islands, the system was taken live in 2017, with approximately 50,000 vehicles now equipped with the RFID-enabled plates and windshield stickers. Between five and 10 checkpoint readers provided by Tönnjes are scheduled to be installed around the county. The company supplies the middleware and software that captures the tag ID reader data and feeds that information, linked to the vehicle IDs, to the Cayman Island government’s vehicle database. The reader installation is posing a unique challenge, Betz says, since the devices had to be mounted on hurricane-proof gantries. The Cayland Islands government needs to ensure that the gantries would be able to sustain high winds.
When it comes to the capturing and filtering of data, Betz notes, one software-based challenge for a system like this is the large number of RFID tags already attached to parts of most modern vehicles. In fact, he estimates, there can be 15 or more RFID tags on a single car, most attached to parts that were being tracked by the manufacturer prior to the car’s sale. “We don’t want to talk to 17 tags [on a single car],” he states. Therefore, the system is designed to screen out all tag reads that are not recognized as part of the IDePlate system.
Turkey has also piloted the technology with vehicles on a testing course of the country’s traffic police, while a trial in Russia tracked the movements of public buses throughout the city of Kazan. In addition, Tönnjes and Kirpestein are in discussions with the government of the Netherlands to conduct an open-road pilot, and is also in talks with vehicle authorities in that country regarding further pilots of the technology.
In addition, the Land Transportation Office (LTO), a department of the Philippine Ministry of Transport, has hired Tönnjes to deliver 3.25 million of its license plates for cars and motorcycles. The government is also purchasing IDeSTIX windscreen labels for 775,000 cars, and IDeSTIX Headlamp Tags for 1.7 million motorcycles.