RFID Privacy Using User-controllable Uniqueness

In this paper, we propose two approaches to protect privacy in the 'Digitally Named World', which is the environment in which 'radio frequency ID's (RFIDs) are attached to any objects in the world, and any objects in the real world can be found by the readers of the RFIDs and the networked database system. One is the approach to conceal the permanent ID under a private ID that users give. The other approach is to assign partial ID sequence to a object, and the rest is given by user-assignable RFID tags. These approaches both attempt to give users the controllability of the uniqueness of IDs from local to global, thereby enabling IDs private or public ones in the required stage of the object's life cycle.