Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), Surveillance and Privacy

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Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID),
Surveillance and Privacy
March 23, 2004
Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D., CISSP Stapleton-Gray
Associates, Inc. www.stapleton-gray.com
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What is RFID?

• Active, passive, or hybrid RF devices

• Operating on various frequencies, hence with
• varying ranges and characteristics

But all

• Operate in the RF spectrum

• Operate over a distance

• Do not require line of sight

• Can be interrogated for data

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A Major RFID Milestonethe EPC standards

• conceived (and now demanded) by major players
• retailers, manufacturers, and the Defense
  Department

• owned by EPCglobal (the UCC and EAN
  International)

• focused primarily on passive RFID tags

• incorporate legacy product code standards

• based on a federated information architecture,
• whose root will be run by... VeriSign

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Where We Are...

• The EPC debuts, September 2003

• Key players demand RFID tagging at
• aggregate (case, pallet) levels

• WalMart

• Defense Department

• Target, and others

• Trials of item-level EPC tagging

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Where Were Headed...
Some degree of EPC pervasiveness...

• Declining costs of tags... 5 each? 1 each?

• Even without RFID, the EPC is a powerful thing

• FDA mandates RFID tagging of pharmaceuticals
• by 2007

An accumulation of non-retail RFID applications
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RFID as a Privacy Problem

• Invisible point surveillance (over a limited
  range)

• Persistent, if pseudonymous, identity

• name binding occurs, and persists

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RFID, Surveillance and Privacyas a Research Field

• What forms of surveillance are possible?

• What will technology enable, on both sides
• of the balance?

• Where and when might we see tipping points?

• What do the public, and policymakers, need to
  know?

An opportunity to study non-cooperative RFID
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The Sorting Door as a Research Testbed
Why a Door?

• a good approximation of real-world scenarios

• a handy metaphor

• a sufficiently stretchy metaphor

One could envision lots of Doors. So...
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The Sorting Door as a Research Testbed (cont.)
A Sorting Door System

• multiple Doors

• shared back-end resources

• global tools and knowledge, and economies of
  scale

• local tools and knowledge

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A Sorting Door Architecture
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Questions?
Stapleton-Gray Associates, Inc. www.stapleton-gr
ay.com