Private and efficient set intersection protocol for RFID-based food adequacy check

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology for automatic object identification that has been implemented in several real-life applications. In this work, we expand a novel relevant application of RFID tags for grocery stores, which aims to check the adequacy of food items with respect to the shoppers' personal preferences. Unlike similar works, we focus on shoppers' privacy and running time efficiency. For this aim, we propose a novel private set intersection (PSI) protocol to be used in matching the shoppers' personal preferences with the set of each item's adequate profiles that are held by the back-end server of the store. We provide a standard security proof against curious stores and malicious customers. For efficiency concern, we build our protocol without cryptographic operations, and we achieve a linear asymptotic complexity of O (v + c) for communications and store-side computations, where v and c are the numbers of profiles in the store's back-end server and the shopper's list of preferences respectively. Moreover, experimental results and comparisons with state-of-the art solutions reveal the scalability of our novel PSI protocol for big market stores.