A secure architecture for the management of Radio Frequency Identification at home

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an object identification technology that is being adopted rapidly by industry and government organizations, such as the United States Department of Defense, consumer products manufacturer Proctor & Gamble, and retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Target. It is expected that RFID will be used to tag consumer items such as food and clothing in the future. While this technology brings many benefits to retailers as well as consumers, it has also caused a lot of concerns about potential threats to consumers' privacy. Although several proposals have been offered in the way of mitigating security and privacy threats created by RFID, none have taken a holistic view of RFID security and management in the consumer home environment. This thesis presents a secure architecture for the use and management of RFID in a home environment. The architecture is platform independent, scalable, extensible, and easy to use for non-technical consumers. The architecture provides increased privacy with a novel mechanism for RFID authentication. A proof-of-concept system based on this architecture is simulated in software to prove that the proposed architecture mitigates many threats related to RFID use by consumers in a home environment while also providing capabilities for the convenient management of RFID tagged objects at home.