Ants can Carry Cheese: Secure and Private RFID-Enabled Third-Party Distribution

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key emerging technology to improve data sharing in item distribution systems. By attaching RFID tags to items, item related data can be bound to items and participants involved in an item distribution system can directly store, access and update the data by interrogating the tags. Such a flexible data access manner of RFID technology, however, raises privacy and security concerns. In this article, we focus on a special item distribution system named RFID-enabled Third-party Distribution (RTD) system and identify two inherent security and privacy requirements. We further design a Secure RTD system called Ants, which uses cryptography to protect item messages carried by tags to satisfy both of the requirements while preserving the flexible data access manner of RFID technology. Ants introduces two new techniques named commitment accumulation and selective message proof for memory-constrained tags to carry long crypto-item messages. We conduct theoretical analysis and experiments to demonstrate the security and efficiency of Ants.