Tamper Detection in RFID Tags Using Zero-watermarks

Recently data integrity issues of applications based on radio frequency identification (RFID) have drawn great concerns worldwide and many watermarking-based schemes have been proposed. While those schemes can effectively verify if the protected tag data be modified, they also expose both the protected data and the watermark to any adversaries. In this paper, we present a zero-watermark scheme, which stores the watermark not in part of the data fields of RFID tags but in the back-end database system or that of a trusted third party without any modification of the original RFID data. The novelty of this zero-watermark scheme lies in the fact that we extend the zero-watermark technology to the RFID tags and the use of data tampering from the limited applications of copyright protection of digital works. We term this scheme ZMark-TamDetect because it is a tamper detection solution using zero-watermarks, which is so designed that it can be easily plugged into existing RFID middleware applications. This proposal is one of the first works that integrates zero-watermark and RFID technologies together and it provides a detailed theoretical foundation for the ZMark-TamDetect.