Privacy threats and issues in mobile RFID

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is used to identify objects and users and automatically takes advantage of contextual information such as user's location is expected to become an important and a core technology of ubiquitous infrastructure. This technology has been applied to many applications such as retail and supply chain. At recent, there are an increasing number of researches related to mobile RFID that provides RFID service to user with a reader embedded in the mobile device as the one of RFID applications. However, there are an increasing number of concerns, and even some resistance, related to user tracking and profiling using RFID technology. Therefore, in this paper, we review privacy threats that have been reported in various RFID applications and bring up some additional privacy threats in mobile RFID, impeding the deployment of mobile RFID. And we analyze whether various privacy protecting measures that have been proposed to address privacy problems in RFID can also apply to mobile RFID.