Mobile RFID Applications and Security Challenges

With mobile RFID technology, handheld portable devices like mobile phones and PDAs, also behave as RFID readers and RFID tags. As RFID readers, mobile phones provide an user-friendly approach to quickly and efficiently scan, access and view information about RFID tagged items. As RFID tags, mobile phones can quickly identify themselves in order to communicate with other tagged devices, which provide essential services. At the outset this paper briefly describes Mobile RFID technology and compare it with conventional RFID technology. We pioneer in categorizing Mobile RFID applications into three distinct zones, namely: Location-based Services (LBS) Zone, Enterprise Zone, and Private Zone. We describe application scenarios related to these zones and highlight various security and privacy threats. Finally, we propose a security architecture for LBS zone and describe our future work.