OpenTag: Privacy Protection for RFID

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is widely used to identify goods in the supply chain and is increasingly implemented in individual manufactured goods at the retail level. This is a positive trend for pervasive computing; ubiquitous, machine-readable tagging of objects has proven valuable yet elusive in the past. With the proliferation of RFID tagged objects, however, comes the possibility of privacy loss. OpenTag was designed to prototype new privacy enhancing algorithms for RFID. Its tags are programmable and work in several modes, including EPC mode, where they're fully compatible with EPCglobal's dominant supply-chain RFID standard. OpenTags can also operate in private mode, frequently altering their IDs so that only authorized readers can predict them, as well as in invisible mode, where they stop responding to readers entirely. Designed for cradle-to-grave object tagging, OpenTags easily and appropriately transition between their various modes. © 2006 IEEE.