Distributed Group Authentication for RFID Supply Management

We investigate an application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) referred to in the literature as group scanning, in which an RFID reader device interrogates several RFID tags to establish “simultaneous” presence of a group of tags. Our goal is to study the group scanning problem in strong adversarial settings and show how group scanning can be used in distributed applications for supply chain management. We present a security framework for group scanning and give a formal description of the attending security requirements. Our model is based on the Universal Composability framework and supports re-usability (through modularity of security guarantees). We propose two novel protocols that realize group scanning in this security model, based on off-the-shelf components such as low-cost (highly optimized) pseudorandom functions, and show how these can be integrated into RFID supply-chain management systems.