RFID is most associated with supply chain applications and item level tagging. But over the last couple of years many other applications for RFID have emerged. One area that is getting an increasing amount of attention is using RFID in document management. In many industries, the value of a printed document can be substantially higher than an equivalent weight of currency. Critical media, legal or financial documents can be embedded with an RFID tag so the document can be located and tracked. It allows these documents to inherit a digital identity and gives computers the ability to search for and locate documents as easy as clicking the search button on an Internet search page.
It also increases information security. Important documents such as earnings releases, merger and acquisition memos, health records and legal documents can be linked to specific people or locations, and un-authorized document movement can be identified. Wouldn’t it be nice if an earnings report could message the CFO that it had left their office?
Two events at the recent RFID Live conference highlight the growth of RFID in document management. Lexmark announced a new RFID enabled printer drawer option for their T60, T642 and T644 laser printers. These are regular laser printers that can be equipped with a special drawer that contains a ThingMagic M5e embedded RFID reader. This allows the laser printer to print documents and other media and encode attached RFID tags.
Also at the show, Dan Zinn, Chief Information Officer of the Florida State Attorney’s office, presented on using RFID to manage case files and documents. The Florida Attorney’s office manages thousands of document case files. Using ThingMagic RFID readers as part of system designed with the help of our business partner Innerwireless, they’ve been able to make tracking and locating case files much more efficient.
We expect to see many more examples of RFID being used to track, locate and secure documents in the coming months.
Ari Juels, Bryan Parno, and I have been working on an approach to solving the key management problem in passive RFID systems. The results of the work are now in peer review, and a preprint is available here.
The key idea (no pun intended!) is to encrypt the tag IDs using a secret key and put shares of the secret key in the RFID tags themselves such that an entity with RF access to a sufficient number of tags (i.e., shares) is able to recover the key and decrypt the tags. An adversary without access to a sufficient number of tags is not able to glean any information about the key or interpret the tag ID (i.e., privacy protection).
This approach works because supply chains possess some interesting properties. First, tags start out in large collections which get smaller over time until there are only a small number on the store shelf and an even smaller number with the consumer. Second, larger collections of tags are usually located in physically secure areas (i.e., backroom of the retail store). Finally, as tags travel through the supply chain, the context they share with each other is lost. An adversary looking some tags on the store shelf does not know anything about their fellow travellers - history is erased. We used these three observations to devise a key management and privacy protection scheme.
"It's not often that one gets good support worldwide. I've been unable to find any other RFID module comparing to ThingMagic's, or getting any other company to support us."
