ABSTRACT

Radio frequency identification device (RFID) is an auto-identification technology that utilizes wireless communications, and is considered to be the next-generation bar code. This chapter examines the studies pertaining to the security and privacy of RFID tags, especially in the context of cryptography. The cost limitation of a tag unit yields another basic property of RFID tags: each tag has weak computational power. The chapter reviews various countermeasures, as well as the existing studies concerning physical approaches and cryptographic approaches for privacy, authenticity, and implementation of cryptographic primitives. The secure RFID tag scheme must have at least authenticity to avoid impersonation, and should have both authenticity and indistinguishability to protect user privacy. The chapter discusses the physical and low-level layer approaches to security and privacy for the RFID system. It describes RFID privacy protection schemes that use a hash function, which is a light weight cryptographic function, and can be computed inside the RFID tag.