A Secure RFID Authentication Scheme for Medicine Applications

Abstract

RFID could be applied to merely about every section in hospitals, including blood bag management, medical record management, precious medical equipment tracking, discarded object management, emergency medical care tracking, resident healthcare monitoring, patient identification, operating room management, nursery management, drug logistics management, and entry access control. All of them could be well handled with RFID technology. Within such RFID applications, enhancing patients' privacy is considered as the primary task. Nevertheless, the limited computational power of RFID tags indicates that they cannot execute complex cryptographic functions. Consequently, the design of an efficient and secure protocol for RFID systems not employing complex cryptographic techniques is an important issue. Although many authentication protocols have recently been developed for RFID, they either cannot protect the location privacy of tags nor have high overhead on identifying tags for the back-end server. None of them provide satisfactory solutions for both problems at the same time. This study proposes an efficiently mutual authentication scheme for RFID that not only guarantees the location privacy of tags, but also efficiently identifies tags for the back-end server.