Privacy-Aware RFID Systems using Elliptic Curve Cryptograohy

The protection of personal privacy is a major concern especially in the field of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID is a contactless communication technology that consists of small microprocessors that are attached to antennas (called tags). The transmission of personal information between tags and readers naturally raise the question of privacy and security. Especially in the e-health strategy of Austria and the European Commission, RFID privacy is a mandatory part of any new procedural or systems development project. "Effort must be made to ensure access is absolutely restricted to only those having a clear right and need to access personal health information or to access the systems within which such information resides" (e-Health Strategy Framework commitment to Safeguard Privacy and Security, pp. 13-14). In this project, we will use Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to achieve strong privacy and security in RFID applications. We aim two goals. First, we target an RFID system that makes use of new techniques to share resources between any RFID components available in the field of a reader. Our goal is to reduce the computational complexity and the memory-requirements of tags to realize the vision of strong privacy-aware services. Sharing the resources allows fast computation and reduces tag-fabrication costs due to the need of less chip area. Furthermore, we target new privacy-aware protocols that make use of our techniques to provide anonymity and untraceability for end-users. Second, we will improve the performance of scalar multiplication on RFID tags by designing new recoding algorithms. Since scalar multiplication is the most resource-consuming operation in ECC, fundamental research will be conducted to reduce the number of needed operations by applying new techniques on the arithmetic, algorithm, and implementation level. Effort will be made especially in the field of low-resource hardware implementations to improve the computational efficiency on passively powered RFID tags. The project is a bilateral project with Austria (IAIK, TU-Graz) and Taiwan (TWISC@NTUST). Both project partners have large expertise in RFID privacy and security and profitably complement one another to achieve the given project goals. We plan to disseminate the scientific results on international conferences to discuss design decisions and to contribute to the research community.