A Watermarking Based Tamper Detection Solution for RFID Tags

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the deployment of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) applications in supply chain management, access control applications and smart compliances. However low cost RFID tags pose unique security and privacy challenges. Within the security umbrella of RFID, there are several open issues and data tampering is one which needs addressing. Watermarking is the art of embedding data directly within content which is imperceptible to humans but readable by computers. We propose a novel watermarking based tamper detection solution for low cost RFID passive tags which uses the 32 bit kill password as the cover medium. Unlike existing watermark based solutions, our solution can detect tampering anywhere in the RFD tag, not just for a specific portion such as the object class or EPC manager. Our proposed solution also conforms to the EPC-Class1 Generation2 specification.