An authentication broker service for secure and confidential EPC

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) has a wide range of potential applications and many successful stories. However, there are certain issues regarding Electronic Product Code (EPC) network architecture and tag-reader security models, such as security, privacy and scalability of the EPC network whilst authenticating RF tags. The EPC network architecture specification has no authentication process to authenticate an RF tag prior to knowing its EPC, but a tag is authenticated at EPC information Service (EPCIS) instead. This may result in the leakage of tag's EPC before its authentication. There is a need of an authentication process in the EPC network so that tag's EPC may only be known once it is successfully authenticated. In this paper we have proposed an authentication broker service for EPC network. A distributed design of the authentication broker service is also discussed.