An Evaluation of the RFID Security Benefits of the APF System: Hospital Patient Data Protection

The main features of RFID are the ability to identify objects without a line of sight between reader and tag, read/write capability and ability of readers to read many tags at the same time. The read/write capability allows information to be stored in the tags embedded in the objects as it travels through a system. Some applications require information to be stored in the tag and be retrieved by the readers. This paper discusses the security and privacy challenges involve in such applications and how the proposed and implemented prototype system Authentication Processing Framework (APF) would be a solution to protect hospital patient data. The deployment of the APF provides mutual authentication for both tags and readers and the mutual authentication process in the APF provides security for the information stored in the tags. A prototype solution for hospital patient data protection for information stored on RFID bracelets is offered.