SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN LOW COST RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION

Automatic Identification (AutoID) technology has introduced innovative ways to collect,manage information and monitor everything from hospital patients and livestock to library books.Radio frequency Identification (RFID) is the burgeoning AutoID becoming a popular tool inmanufacturing, supply chain management and retail inventory control. Optical barcodes, anothercommon automatic identification system, have been used for packaging on consumer items foryears. Due to advances in silicon manufacturing technology, RFID costs have dropped significantly and in the near future, low-cost RFID electronic product codes may be a practical replacement for optical barcodes on consumer items. Unfortunately, the universal deployment of RFID devices in consumer items exposes new security and privacy risks. This thesis presents an introduction to RFID technology, identifies several potential threats to security and privacy indifferent authentication protocols, and proposes a new authentication protocol for incorporatingsecurity and privacy features in low cost RFID communication. I demonstrate that the proposedprotocol provides a secure framework for RFID communication in addition to the fact that it does not cause any additional overhead in the singulation time.