Privacy Challenges in RFID Systems

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are one of the most prominent communication technologies, recently expanding from common applications such as supply chains, access control, and tracking systems to healthcare applications, intelligent transport systems, etc. Consequently, many applications raise privacy issues since primitive tags can be easily accessed by an attacker. So far, standards from ISO, IEC, and EPCglobal provide a simple password protection for the access control or no protection at all. Therefore, many nonstandard solutions are being proposed using cryptographic primitives such as hash functions, private-key algorithms, and public-key algorithms. In this chapter, we give an overview of security solutions for RFID systems and discuss their security properties. We also introduce our novel authentication protocols.