Private identification of RFID tags

Abstract

A lightweight identification mechanism is proposed for RFID systems in which the privacy of tags is protected against unknown readers. Private identification of RFID tags allows authorized readers to easily identify the tags. The identity of the tag is secure across multiple readers, and unknown readers will not be able to trace the tag throughout the system. Our proposed scheme is based on McEliece public-key cryptosystem rearranged in a novel way to meet the practical requirements of RFID tags. Complex computational operations in the McEliece cryptosystem are removed from the RFID tags, as they only perform simple binary operations on short vectors.The public-key cryptosystem simplifies the key sharing in the system, and it can readily scale to large RFID systems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.