Privacy enhanced active RFID tag

Abstract

In the coming future ubiquitous society, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags will be affixed to every product and person. This technology is anticipated to be a key technology that will be utilized by various ubiquitous services where these tags will be used to identify things and people and will automatically take advantage of contextual information such as location. On the other hand, a problem is arising where the excellent tracking ability of RFID is abused and personal privacy is being violated. This paper clarifies the active tag privacy problem and proposes a method for protecting personal privacy regarding the active RFID tags. In the proposed method, reencryption technologies are used to make the tag ID variable. Since variable IDs generated from one ID are cannot be linked to one another by third parties, RFID privacy problems based on a fixed ID can be abated. Furthermore, we introduce an active tag prototype that implements the proposed method and evaluated its effectiveness