Enhancing security and anti-collision in RFID systems

Radio Frequency Identifications (RFID) have a wide range of functions in many different sectors, and companies are increasingly placing RFID tags on their products for a variety of reasons. Despite their high utility, the wireless nature of RFID systems understandably raises scalability and security concerns, particularly during the transmission of information between RFID tags and readers. This thesis proposes the development of a secure anti-collision method that can be implemented in an RFID system. A variety of techniques are researched, discussed and compared to determine the most plausible enhancement techniques. Primarily, these will include Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) and the Extended Tiny Encryption Algorithm (XTEA). To increase collision avoidance, an enhanced version of CSMA/CA is proposed, which utilizes simultaneous dual frequencies on the readers. Furthermore, besides allowing each transmission between reader and tag to be encrypted using XTEA, our main security enhancement will allow data to appear unpredictable and random. This is achieved using a Random Access ID to rewrite the tag's internal memory with every response from the reader. Simulation results confirm that in terms of security and collision, our combined, secure anti-collision method was able to achieve favorable results, which are graphically displayed and discussed in detail.