Traceability requirements for information systems in the agro-food sector

Food safety and quality are keys to companies' business survival and great effort and resources are devoted to them. The food production chain, from the farms and feed mills to the finished products leaving the processing plants, is subject to independent examination and auditing either under the sector's own assurance schemes under official regulatory inspection and testing programmes with published results. For farmers and the agro-food industry, this means new market opportunities – and continual change. Food safety is an on-going challenge, demanding the best control systems and day-to-day vigilance on farms, in processing plants and throughout the distribution system. In order to enable consumers to make the right choice when buying their food and in order to build up markets for quality products, labelling has to provide all relevant information about the production process. Besides complete information about its ingredients, food labels should bear information about its place of origin and the way in which it was produced

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

Radio Frequency Identification System Optimisation Models for Lifecycle of a Durable Product

We address the implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to support and manage durable products over their entire lifecycle with a focus on optimising the RFID tagging system. We develop general models that optimise the placement of RFID tags on an end product and its components, the allocation of the data on tags, and the selection of RFID tags and their configuration. The primary criteria for optimisation are to maximise the value of RFID data, and to minimise the total cost of the RFID tag system. The total cost of RFID tags comprises costs associated with memory capacity, tag type, software acquisition and maintenance, and number of tags used; the total value for a piece of data is determined by the data usage frequency and the fixed and variable value of data per use across the product lifecycle. The tag placement and data allocation model involves making a decision about these two different objectives–cost and value, which we develop in the form of a multi-objective optimisation problem. The tag selection model aids in the proper selection of RFID tags and their configuration for individual components for a given end product. Given a durable product's characteristics along with its bill-of-materials, a system of RFID tags can efficiently be determined for the product and its components, to help manage and support its lifecycle

Printed Electronics in Product Identification and Tracing

Food and livestock traceability and tracking are now very hot topics because of severe threats to health and the need to comply with stringent new legislation. The traceability of products and components has received critical attention over the past few years. The requirements from the individual segments of the food industry may vary. The solutions of these problems are the introduction of modern quality assurance systems, traceability and identification of products