Security and Privacy Requirements for RFID Schemes in Healthcare: Case Studies, Solutions, and Challenges

Abstract

RFID technology has proven very useful in many healthcare applications, starting with medical asset tracking, continuing with staff tracking, and reaching medical event and procedure tracking. Security and privacy properties play a fundamental role in this range of applications. The protocols proposed so far highlights many techniques for analyzing these properties, making it difficult to compare the protocols with each other most of the time. In the case of lightweight protocols, the comparisons are even more challenging to achieve because these resort to idealizations that usually have no practical support, such as protocols based on physically unclonable functions (PUFs), or because no security and privacy model is known so far. This paper draws attention to the HPVP model as a possibility for uniformly studying healthcare RFID protocols’ security and privacy properties. We highlight two general patterns that, once encountered in RFID protocols, show that they do not satisfy privacy or mutual authentication requirements. We then illustrate these templates through several proposed RFID protocols for use in healthcare. Then, we propose a Classification of healthcare services based on an extended hierarchy of HPVP privacy classes, and we highlight RFID protocols that reach the respective levels of privacy.