Toward an RFID Scheme for Secure Material Flow Tracing and Verification in Supply Chains

Radio Frequency Identification RFID is an important wireless communication and pervasive computing technique used for automatic item identification and data capture. In this paper, we present a scheme for securely tracing material flow in supply chains using the inherent RFID authentication and data logging capability. The scheme provides not only an overall path tracing and verification through the entire supply chain, but also the product identification within the scope of a supply chain partner. RFID tags and readers are deployed to ensure that only authorized supply chain partners can identify the tagged items in a secure and private way. The authors develop tag-reader authentication protocols to ensure the authenticity of RFID tags and readers. Their approach avoids the single point failure of the supply chain server-there is no need for each supply chain partner to communicate with the server for every material flow. Therefore, it minimizes the risks caused by system interruptions due to network failures or server unavailability.