Quantifying Information Leakage in RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems provide large scale, automated tracking solutions and superior reliability over existing tracking systems as well as the possibility of authentication, but also pose a threat to customer privacy, which already drew great attentions from researchers in this field. In this paper the quantifying information leakage in RFID systems will be first investigated via the Shannon\´s information theory, and the analysis results are also extended from binary to r-ary coding systems. The secondary contribution of this paper is that based on the first part discussion a modified "hash-chain" protocol is presented that decreasing the heavy burden on back- end database to authenticate tags, which the normal hash-chain protocol computes hash function many times on every tag.