
102 CHAPTER FOUR
Tag Features for Security and Privacy
There are justifiable privacy and security concerns with any sort of identification technol-
ogy, and RFID, as much as biometrics, has raised popular concern because of its possible
impact on personal privacy. A common concern is that an unauthorized person will be
able to obtain information from, or possibly even change information stored on, an RFID
tag. There is some legitimacy to these concerns. A tag that does not use a secure protocol
might be read by anyone, just as a bar code or printed label might be read by anyone. A
writable tag might also be maliciously altered if it does not implement a secure protocol for
communication with a reader. This alteration might be less obvious than someone placing
a false bar code or printed tag on a piece of merchandise. Unlike printed tags and bar
codes, which will always remain at risk, future secure protocols will make RFID tags very
difficult to forge or even read without authorization. The more secure the tag, however,
the more expensive it is, and an unencrypted, read-only tag is no more risky in the right
application than a bar code is now. For these reasons, many supply chain applications cur-
rently use less-secure RFID implementations. As overall RFID prices drop due both to
wider adoption and standardization, the cost of more secure will also drop, and these in
turn will become more widely ...