A novel coding scheme for secure communications in distributed RFID systems

Privacy protection is the primary concern when RFID applications are deployed in our daily lives. Due to the computational power constraints of passive tags, non-encryption-based singulation protocols have been recently developed, in which wireless jamming is used. However, the existing private tag access protocols without shared secrets rely on impractical physical layer assumptions, and thus they are difficult to deploy. To tackle this issue, we first redesign the architecture of RFID system by dividing an RF reader into two different devices, an RF activator and a trusted shield device (TSD). Then, we propose a novel coding scheme, namely Random Flipping Random Jamming (RFRJ), to protect tags' content. Unlike the past work, the proposed singulation protocol utilizes only the physical layer techniques that are already implemented. Analyses and simulation results validate our distributed architecture with the RFRJ coding scheme, which defends tags' privacy against various adversaries including the random guessing attack, correlation attack, ghost-and-leech attack, and eavesdropping.