An approach to enhance the safety and security of EPC Class-1 generation-2 UHF RFID systems

Abstract

UHF RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is one of the most rising technologies in the automatic identification field. With the advantages of long distance, high speed and low cost communication, it will become a fundamental technology of our future society. The RFID-based applications that are related to personal information, require a practical solution to the privacy protection. However, the wireless communication between the RFID reader and the RFID tag is based on electromagnetic radiations, which are fully accessible by adversaries, and also make the communication not robust. In this paper, we present our approach to evaluate the RFID systems taking into account these two aspects: security and safety. This approach focuses on validating secure and robust UHF RFID systems considering the whole system in the presence of faults in real environment. Also, it will guide us to distinguish the most sensitive system components in order to facilitate developing low cost more secured and robust tag architectures. This paper explains why and how we plan to evaluate and improve robustness and security of UHF RFID systems.