From the Farm to Fork

In this chapter the authors present their information model implemented for one pilot developed in the “RFID from Farm to Fork” (F2F) project which looks for the extension of RFID technologies throughout the complete food chain. They describe the privacy assessment proposed by the European Union that allows the evaluation of the privacy and security impact for a RFID application under study. The main privacy risks have been identified and described by the related EU Directives concerning RFID technology. The authors describe the questionnaire elaborated by the EU to assess the privacy robustness level of a RFID application, and they showcase a real wine pilot deployed in Spain. In this chapter, the authors also examine the privacy risks in the middleware communication with both RFID reader and back-end system. The EPCIS has been the Open Source middleware solution adopted in the F2F project. For the F2F pilot deployed in the wine sector, the authors describe the privacy impact assessment questionnaire designed for this case. Finally, they discuss the threads on the RFID tags, the advantages provided by the WISP technology in this regard and its repercussion on the risk questionnaire.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography on WISPs

In this chapter, the authors explore the feasibility of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) on Wireless Identification and Sensing Platforms (WISPs). ECC is a public-key based cryptographic primitive that has been widely adopted in embedded systems and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In order to demonstrate the practicability of ECC on such platforms, the authors make use of the passively powered WISP4.1DL UHF tag from Intel Research Seattle. They implemented ECC over 192-bit prime fields and over 191-bit binary extension fields and performed a Montgomery ladder scalar multiplication on WISPs with and without a dedicated hardware multiplier. The investigations show that when running at a frequency of 6.7 MHz, WISP tags that do not support a hardware multiplier need 8.3 seconds and only 1.6 seconds when a hardware multiplier is supported. The binary-field implementation needs about 2 seconds without support of a hardware multiplier. For the WISP, ECC over prime fields provides best performance when a hardware multiplier is available; binary-field based implementations are recommended otherwise. The use of ECC on WISPs allows the realization of different public-key based protocols in order to provide various cryptographic services such as confidentiality, data integrity, non-repudiation, and authentication.

RFID Grouping-Proofs

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a challenging wireless technology with a great potential for supporting supply and inventory management. In this chapter the authors consider a particular application in which a group of tagged items are scanned to generate a record of simultaneous presence called a grouping-proof. Grouping-proofs can be used, for instance, to guarantee that drugs are shipped (or dispensed) accompanied by their corresponding information leaflets, to couple the user’s electronic passport with his/her bags, to recognize the presence of groups of individuals and/or equipment and more generally to support the security of supply and inventory systems. Although it is straightforward to design solutions when the verifier is online since it is sufficient for individual tags to authenticate themselves to the verifier, interesting security engineering challenges arise when the trusted server (or verifier) is not online during the scan activity. So, the field of grouping-proofs is very active, and many works have been published so far. This chapter details the setting for RFID grouping-proofs and discuss the threat model for such applications. The authors analyze some of the grouping-proofs proposed in the literature describing their advantages and disadvantages. Then, general guidelines for designing secure grouping-proofs are proposed. Finally, some examples of grouping-proofs that are provably secure in a strong security framework are presented.

Security of EPC Class-1

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a common technology for identifying objects, animals, or people. The main form of barcode-type RFID device is known as an Electronic Product Code (EPC) and the most popular standard for passive RFID tags is Class-1 Generation-2. In this technology, the information transmitted between devices is through the air, therefore adversaries can eavesdrop these messages passed on the insecure radio channel and finally, the security of the system can be compromised. In this chapter, the authors analyze the security of EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard, showing its security weaknesses and presenting some possible countermeasures.

Real-Time Traceability with Sensing in RFID Applications

Traceability and embedded sensing are analyzed in this chapter by three main approaches: firstly, a Wireless Sensor Network; secondly, a Sensor Area Network; and, finally, a Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform. This chapter presents an introduction to the “RFID F2F” action, and its application to the wine sector briefly describing a wine pilot developed in Spain. The traceability system resulting of the WSN and RFID integration is sketched and concisely described. The current deployment of this pilot is commented. In a second block, this chapter introduces the accomplishment of an RFID tracking through a mesh of individual active radiofrequency (RF) barriers composed by active emitter and receiver nodes/tags that cover only small individual areas. The result is a Sensor Area Network (SAN). Finally, the authors of this chapter discuss the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform technology. WISP chips have the capabilities of RFID tags ?compliant with EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard? but they also support embedded sensing and computing. WISP technology is shown as the next step forward in the design of pervasive devices. The chapter discusses the main features of the emerging computational RFID technologies.

WISP-Based Devices as Part of a Home Telecare Node

A systematic literature review of published sources that discuss radio frequency identification technology, ubiquitous health care, and dosage measurement was performed. The results were then critiqued. Methods of storing data and using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) were studied. These results were used as an aid for developing a prototype system for monitoring medication dosages in a home health care environment. The combination of an RFID technology – the Intel Wireless Sensor Platform (WISPs) and the construction of a specific pill dispensing container in this prototype demonstrated that it is possible to use RFID technology to effectively and ubiquitously monitor and track drug taking compliance. With further refinements on the dispensing unit and optimization of the software this product could be manufactured and released to home care patients to help increase compliance and reduce health related issues. This could form the heart of a modular telecare data collection system. RFID-based devices that can store data in standardized formats may allow incremental development of home telecare systems in an economical fashion.

Monitoring Sleep with WISP Tags

This chapter presents a sleep monitoring system based on WISP tags. The authors show that their system accurately infers fine-grained body positions from accelerometer data collected from the WISP tags attached to the sides of a bed. Movements, duration, and bed entrances and exits are also detected by the system. The chapter presents the results of an empirical study from 10 subjects on three different mattresses in controlled experiments to show the accuracy of the inference algorithms. The authors also evaluate the accuracy of the movement detection and body position inference for six nights on one subject, and compare these results with two baseline systems. Preliminary data investigating the correlation between sleep stages from the Zeo and movement is also presented.

Low Complexity Minimal Instruction Set Computer Design using Anubis Cipher for Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform

This chapter presents a low complexity processor design for efficient and compact hardware implementation for WISP system security using the involution cipher Anubis algorithm. WISP has scarce resources in terms of hardware and memory, and it is reported that it has 32K of program and 8K of data storage, thus providing sufficient memory for design implementation. The chapter describes Minimal Instruction Set Computer (MISC) processor designs with a flexible architecture and simple hardware components for WISPs. The MISC is able to make use of a small area of the FPGA and provides security programs and features for WISPs. In this chapter, an example application, which is Anubis involution cipher algorithm, is used and proposed to be implemented onto MISC. The proposed MISC hardware architecture for Anubis can be designed and verified using the Handel-C hardware description language and implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA.

Tag Identification Protocols in RFID Systems

Fast and reliable identification of multiple objects that are present at the same time is very important in many applications. A very promising technology for this purpose is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which is fast pervading many application fields, like public transportation and ticketing, access control, production control, animal identification, and localization of objects and people. The problem approached in this chapter is the tag identification in RFID systems. This problem occurs when several tags try to answer at the same time to a reader query. If more than one tag answers, their messages will collide on the RF communication channel, and the reader cannot identify these tags. There are two families of protocols for approaching the tag collision problem: a family of probabilistic protocols, and a family of deterministic ones. In this chapter, the authors give an overview of the most important approaches and trends for tag identification in RFID systems and provide the results of a deep comparison of the presented tag identification protocols in terms of complexity and performance.

Towards Sensing-Enabled RFID Security and Privacy

Recent technological advancements enrich many RFID tags with sensing capabilities. This new generation of RFID devices – supporting sensing, computation, and RFID communication - can facilitate numerous promising applications for ubiquitous sensing and computation. They also suggest new ways of providing security and privacy for RFID systems by utilizing the unique characteristics of sensor data and sensing technologies. In this chapter, the authors highlight these new possibilities and advocate the use of sensing-enabled RFID tags in security-critical applications. The purpose of this chapter is to bring awareness of these opportunities to both the research and industrial community, and to incite interests in sensing-centric security and privacy research and development for the future generation of RFID systems.