Lessons to be Learned for a Good Design of Private RFID Schemes

RFID technology is increasingly used in various areas of society, where privacy plays a critical role. Due to this aspect, a sustained effort has been devoted in recent years to develop privacy models for RFID systems. Two widely accepted such models are Vaudenay’s model and the HPVP model. An incursion into the broad diversity of the RFID schemes developed so far shows that many of them do not assure privacy in any of the two models. That is either due to design errors or because their authors did not run any privacy analysis or have used weaker ad hoc privacy models. This article presents five design scenarios underlying constructions of RFID schemes that cannot provide certain levels of privacy in any of the two models. Each scenario is richly exemplified by RFID schemes proposed in the literature, and it is concluded by a lesson to guide us to a better design of such schemes.