Design of Secure and Low-Cost RFID Tag Baseband

Nowadays, radio frequency identification (RFID) has been widely used in our everyday life, and has aroused increasing concerns about privacy and security. Cryptographic techniques can be used to protect privacy but are too expensive for low-cost RFID tags. This paper addresses the problem and proposes a new RFID system structure. In our system, the RFID tag sends only the hashed tag ID number to the reader, thus even if the communication data is intercepted, the adversary cannot retrieve any useful information. This paper also presents the RFID tag baseband design based on this new structure. Our design is implemented in an Altera FPGA. The experiment shows that the security of the baseband is largely enhanced compared to non-secure basic tags, while having less gate equivalents than some secure tags with other RFID system structures and cryptographic implementations.