Security and User Privacy for Mobile-RFID Applications in Public Zone

To make RFID technology assist people in their daily lives, a new technology called “Mobile-RFID” (mRFID) is being considered. The mRFID technology incorporates RFID-reader functionality into portable handheld devices. In a public zone (e.g., street, shopping mall) we can use our mobile phone as an mRFID-reader to scan tagged merchandize and quickly download information about that merchandize. In this paper we emphasize that, with the ubiquitous presence of mRFID-readers all around us, in the form of mobile phones, we also need to consider some special security and privacy threats. We propose a security framework, which addresses issues such as: identifying cloned fake tags attached to counterfeit products, consumer authorization, secure and anonymous communication with only genuine information-servers that provide information about a particular tagged item, blocking malicious mRIFD-readers from snooping on the tagged items in our possession, and finally, a simple and secure mRFID payment scheme.