RFID: security and privacy for five-cent wireless devices (abstract only)

A radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag is a small, inexpensive wireless device that emits an identifier in response to interrogation from a nearby reader. The price of basic RFID tags promises to drop to the range of several cents per unit in the next several years, offering a viable and versatile successor technology to the optical barcode. In this and many other guises, RFID is poised to play an important role in the commercial world. RFID will also increasingly enter the hands of consumers in the form of payment devices and physical access tokens, and at some point as item-specific barcodes.In spreading information about the whereabouts of physical objects, RFID will add a beneficial new layer of awareness to computing networks. The flip side, however, will be a host of new privacy and security problems. With their exceedingly frugal computing resources, basic RFID tags pose an especial challenge to security architects. True cryptographic functionality will likely remain beyond the reach of these devices for some time to come. RFID therefore calls for specially adapted security techniques.Keeping such facts in sight, this talk explores some emerging technical approaches to privacy and security for RFID systems.