A Survey of RFID Privacy Protection Technologies

A Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag which consists of tiny chip and antenna is expected as one of the most important infrastructure technology for ubiquitous society, because the RFID tag will be affixed to almost all items and used for various useful ubiquitous services in the future. On the one hand, such a wide deployment of RFID may expose new privacy threats of citizens by abuse of powerful tracking capability of the RFID. Recently RFID privacy issues become an object of public concern. For example, in Europe and the United States, some consumer groups has mounted protest campaigns against the RFID demonstration experiments that were planed by apparel companies, major retail stores, schools and libraries, etc, or RFID privacy protection bills were submitted in California, etc. Also in Japan, ministries announced RFID privacy protection guideline for companies that use RFID. Technical efforts fall behind such system and policy efforts at present. Privacy protection technology implemented in existing RFID tags is only Kill function that is used to permanently deactivate a tag. Privacy protection technologies other than Kill function will be needed to use RFID tags safety for various useful ubiquitous services in the future. This speech introduces a survey of RFID privacy protection technologies. First, the RFID privacy problem is classified from a technical perspective, and technical requirements about cost and performance are introduced. Next, I explain representative RFID privacy protection technologies, MIT Hash-lock method, RSA Blocker tag and NTT Hash-chain method, etc. Moreover, classification of RFID privacy protection technologies and up-to-date protection methods are also outlined.