Analysis Of The RFID Security And Privacy Issues In E-Passport

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology. It allows effective identification of a large number of tagged objects without physical or visual contact. RFID systems are a promising technology for supply chain management, inventory control, identity identification and public traffic management.As individual item tagging becomes a reality, security and privacy concerns over RFID use come to the fore. The shared radio medium allows eavesdropping and unauthorized tag reading which poses threats to individual's privacy. Moreover, due to the mode of use of RFID, new threats emerge. For example, an intruder may be able to track the movement of an individual by repeatedly querying an RFID attached to the item that this individual carries. It's necessary to offer an effective access-control mechanism in order to solve the security and private issues. After the 9/11 terror attacks against the US there have been concerns about how to positively identify every individual entering a country. As a direct result e-Passports are now being issued in several countries all over the world. The e-Passports include biometrics and other personal information on a RFID chip. Based on the RFID chip, e-Passports are significantly more secure than their predecessors. Forging an e-Passport is definitely thwarted by the use of cryptographic means. In spite of their undeniable benefit, e-Passports have raised questions about security and private protection, since attacks on the basic access control mechanism came into sight. Keys used for that purpose derive from the nothing but predictable machine readable zone data, and so suffer from weak entropy.The limited size and cost considerations do not allow to implement conventional cryptographic systems on RFID. It should pay attention to lightweight arithmetic. In this thesis, some researches on how to enhance security and privacy of e-Passports system are done. The main work are as the followings:1. The characteristics and the threats to security and privacy of RFID system are analyzed, and then the requirements of RFID security and privacy are analyzed and defined. The mechanisms about solving RFID security and privacy problems are analyzed and summarized.2. The characteristics and the threats to security and privacy of e-Passport system are analyzed. Based on the study about the mechanisms, analyze it's disadvantage and give the proposal of the improvement.3. A new mutual authentication protocol is proposed, which provides the identified privacy and security features and is also efficient. And analyze its security and privacy issues as it's used in e-Passport.