Selective collision based medium access control protocol for proactive protection of privacy for RFID

RFID is rapidly being deployed because of its versatility. However, the privacy problem cannot be handled effectively because of limited capability of RFID tags. We propose a secure medium access control(MAC) protocol to solve the privacy problem. Our secure MAC protocol defines a special kind of tag called an "ownership tag". The singulation procedure is well defined only if the ownership tag is involved in the singulation process. Instead of scrambling the information of ordinary tag using the ownership tag's key information and just sending ownership tag's information in clear form, we use forced collision generated by the ownership tag to let a reader know garbage bits that are inserted in ordinary tags. Security and performance analysis for the protocol are provided.