In Things We Trust? Towards trustability in the Internet of Things

This essay discusses the main privacy, security and trustability issues with the Internet of Things

Practical Schemes For Privacy & Security Enhanced RFID

Proper privacy protection in RFID systems is important. However, many of the schemes known are impractical, either because they use hash functions instead of the more hardware efficient symmetric encryption schemes as a efficient cryptographic primitive, or because they incur a rather costly key search time penalty at the reader. Moreover, they do not allow for dynamic, fine-grained access control to the tag that cater for more complex usage scenarios. In this paper we investigate such scenarios, and propose a model and corresponding privacy friendly protocols for efficient and fine-grained management of access permissions to tags. In particular we propose an efficient mutual authentication protocol between a tag and a reader that achieves a reasonable level of privacy, using only symmetric key cryptography on the tag, while not requiring a costly key-search algorithm at the reader side. Moreover, our protocol is able to recover from stolen readers.Comment: 18 page

Efficient Detection of Counterfeit Products in Large-scale RFID Systems Using Batch Authentication Protocols

RFID technology facilitates processing of product information, making it a promising technology for anti-counterfeiting. However, in large-scale RFID applications, such as supply chain, retail industry, pharmaceutical industry, total tag estimation and tag authentication are two major research issues. Though there are per-tag authentication protocols and probabilistic approaches for total tag estimation in RFID systems, the RFID authentication protocols are mainly per-tag-based where the reader authenticates one tag at each time. For a batch of tags, current RFID systems have to identify them and then authenticate each tag sequentially, one at a time. This increases the protocol execution time due to the large volume of authentication data. In this paper, we propose to detect counterfeit tags in large-scale system using efficient batch authentication protocol. We propose FSA-based protocol, FTest, to meet the requirements of prompt and reliable batch authentication in large-scale RFID applications. FTest can determine the validity of a batch of tags with minimal execution time which is a major goal of large-scale RFID systems. FTest can reduce protocol execution time by ensuring that the percentage of potential counterfeit products is under the user-defined threshold. The experimental result demonstrates that FTest performs significantly better than the existing counterfeit detection approaches, for example, existing authentication techniques

PGMAP: a privacy guaranteed mutual authentication protocol conforming to EPC class 1 gen 2 standards

To resolve the security vulnerabilities and comply with EPC Class 1 Gen 2 UHF RFID (EPC C1G2) Standard at the same time, we present a Privacy Guaranteed Mutual Authentication Protocol (PGMAP). By utilizing the existing functions and memory bank of tag, we amend the processing sequence based on current EPC architecture. An auto-updating index number IDS is enrolled to provide privacy protection to EPC code and a set of light weight algorithms utilizing tag's PRNG are added for authentication. Several attacks to the existing security solutions can be effectively resolved in our protocol. © 2008 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE 2008), Xi'an, China, 22-24 October 2008. In Proceedings of ICEBE, 2008, p. 289-29

A survey of RFID privacy approaches

A bewildering number of proposals have offered solutions to the privacy problems inherent in RFID communication. This article tries to give an overview of the currently discussed approaches and their attribute