My Research Paper In Security and privacy of RFID human Implant

The research paper has been discussed several parts of the RFID human Implant, with focusing on the security and privacy of it. In the beginning, the paper explained what the RFID is. RFID is a very small chip implant into the body. This technology has been used in Medical field and Security clearances. Then, the research paper clarifies about RFID facing many security and privacy concerns. Under these two concerns included location privacy, user information, and breaching the RFID implant chip and stole the transmitted information. Moreover, the research paper offered solutions to minimize these concerns. One of the suitable and reliable solutions is Cryptography. This method divided into two main categories: Symmetric encryption and Asymmetric encryption.

RFID implant Chip and it Applications

Until recently many researchers have shown interest in the field of implantable RFID chips. The size of the chip is as small as a grain of rice that contains microchip and antenna coil. It uses magnetics field for powering. (Foster & Jaeger, 2007) The chip is ideal to be injected in knees, hips, hands, or forearm. (Afzaal, 2013) The RFID implant technology has been used in several applications such as: Medical field as they can be used to locate and identify patients, patient’s treatments, and help doctors to review patient’s history easily (Investigation into the Future of RFID in Biomedical, 2003). Also, it has been used for security clearances purposes in order to monitors the entrances and recognizes pedestrians (Tracking People’s Movements by RFID Implants).

Privacy and security of RFID human implant

On the other hand, RFID implementable chips are facing many security and privacy concerns. The RFID human implant privacy concern for users is the location privacy (clandestine tracking) and user information (Ari, 2005). Moreover, the security concern is attackers may be able to breach the RFID implant chip and stole the transmitted information between the tag and the reader. Security attacks can be categorized into Active and Passive Attacks (Istvan & Buttyán, 2003).

One Example of Active attacks are Relay attack which acts as a man in the middle. It is a device placed between the RFID tag and the reader. This device can modify the radio signal and relayed it from legitimate tag/reader to the other legitimate tag/reader (Mitrokotsa , Rieback, & Tanenbaum, Classifying RFID attacks and defenses, 2009). In addition, Examples of Passive attacks are spoofing and cloning. In spoofing the attackers employ a device to emulate RFID tags to give some data which leads to impersonating (Mitrokotsa , Rieback, & Tanenbaum, Classifying RFID attacks and defenses, 2009). The cloning attack done by copying the tag’s ID and any data that associated with the clone-tag. (Mitrokotsa , Rieback, & Tanenbaum, Classifying RFID attacks and defenses, 2009).

 Potential solution

A lot of researches have provided various solutions to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the data and to prevent any unauthorized access to the chip. In many researches, Cryptographic method has been considered as one of the suitable and reliable solution. Cryptography is a way of transmitting and storing data in a particular form so that only authorized people can read and process it (Rieback, et al., 2006).    

Cryptographic methods can be divided into two main categories: Symmetric encryption and Asymmetric encryption (Falk, Koepf, Braun, Seuschek, & Li, 2008). Symmetric encryption is considered as one of the most used mothed to encrypt RFID chips. Symmetric cryptography subdivided into two sections, stream ciphers and block ciphers. Stream ciphers uses cryptographic key and algorithm that are utilized to each binary digit in a data stream, one bit at a time to produce a ciphertext (Rouse & Margaret, 2005). However, block ciphers is better and faster because it works on a fixed-size block of data using a secret key rather than individual bit in a stream. On the other hand, Asymmetric encryption is more complicated than the symmetric encryption because it uses two encryption key, one is private key and the other is public key (Yan Zhang, 2009). In addition, hash function is considered as one of the most reliable cryptographic methods because it is impossible to be recreated or invert. Another common solution to preserve privacy of the RFID implant chip is re-encryption which is to re-encrypt the cipher-text to get a new cipher-text. (Langeraert, 2014) (Janssen)