A distributed architecture for scalable private RFID tag identification

The fast growth of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) implies a deployment challenge, namely how to keep this technology scalable without renouncing security and privacy features. This paper focuses on combining tag privacy and scalability using the hash locks mechanism. Our contribution is twofold: (i) a cell-based architecture is proposed in which the readers co-operate in order to conduct tag identification in a private and scalable way; (ii) a communication protocol for the proposed architecture is defined and assessed. The proposed architecture and protocol solve the scalability shortcomings of private RFID identification pointed out by Juels and Weis.