Globe Staff Consulting Corp (fka GSFC)

[Minddoc7]

Article of interest:
http://www.telematicsupdate.com/homepage2.asp?news=52826

America News: University-led research beefs up smart tag security
Researchers are developing cryptographic protocols, hardware and applications in an initiative to strengthen security for smart tags. (10/3/2006)


Led by Kevin Fu of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the initiative has received $1.1 million from the National Science Foundation.
While millions of consumers already use smart tags to identify and track assets, products and people, Fu says that users’ privacy can be easily compromised, which presents new challenges in terms of security.

Since RFID tags can be read from within a certain distance of a reader antenna, this also means that they can be read by anyone with the right equipment within the read range.

The new consortium, dubbed the RFID ConsortiUm for Security & Privacy (RFID-CUSP), takes these operating conditions into account and is designing new cryptographic definitions, algorithms and models that will lay the solid foundation on which secure applications can be built. As part of their project, the researchers are working with the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART). The project will result in the first completely open, publicly available software for experimenting with RFID security and privacy.

According to Fu, the team is addressing security at a holistic level: strengthening security at the lowest layer (the hardware) and at the levels of protocols and applications.