RFID privacy: relation between two notions, minimal condition, and efficient construction

  • Authors:
  • Changshe Ma;Yingjiu Li;Robert H. Deng;Tieyan Li

  • Affiliations:
  • Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore;Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore;Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore;Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Privacy of RFID systems is receiving increasing attention in the RFID community. Basically, there are two kinds of RFID privacy notions: one based on the indistinguishability of two tags, denoted as ind-privacy, and the other based on the unpredictability of the output of a protocol, denoted as unp-privacy. In this paper, the definition of unp-privacy is refined and the relation between the two notions is clarified: it is proven that ind-privacy is weaker than unp-privacy. Moreover, the minimal (necessary and sufficient)condition on RFID tags to achieve unp-privacy is determined. It is shown that if an RFID system has strong (or weak) unp-privacy then the computational power of an RFID tag can be used to construct a pseudorandom function family provided that the RFID system is complete and sound. On the other hand, if each tag is able to compute a pseudorandom function, then the tags can be used to construct an RFID system with strong (or weak) unp-privacy. In this sense, a pseudorandom function family is the minimal requirement on an RFID tag's computational power for enforcing strong RFID system privacy. Finally, a new RFID protocol is proposed to satisfy the minimal requirement, which also outperforms the state-of-the-art RFID protocols in terms of computational cost and communication overhead.