Some methods for privacy in RFID communication

  • Authors:
  • Kenneth P. Fishkin;Sumit Roy;Bing Jiang

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Research Seattle, Seattle, Washington;Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington;Intel Research Seattle, Seattle, Washington

  • Venue:
  • ESAS'04 Proceedings of the First European conference on Security in Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

For RFID tags to gain general acceptance, they will have to offer powerful and flexible privacy mechanisms. After reviewing existing and upcoming privacy mechanisms for RFID privacy, we propose that a key aspect of RFID communication with passive tags, namely its required energy transference from an external antenna, may offer promise when developing privacy mechanisms. We present two proposals for such mechanisms. In the first mechanism, analysis of the received signal by the tags can be used to estimate reader distance (and hence trust). We show that a simple metric analogous to signal to noise ratio correlates well with rough distance. In the second, antenna energy is used to power a tiered authentication scheme, in which tags reveal more information about themselves to more trusted and/or “energetic” readers.