Utilizing RF Interference to Enable Private Estimation in RFID Systems

Counting or estimating the number of tags is crucial for RFID system. Researchers have proposed several fast cardinality estimation schemes to estimate the quantity of a batch of tags within a short time frame. Existing estimation schemes scarcely consider the privacy issue. Without effective protection, the adversary can utilize the responding signals to estimate the number of tags as accurate as the valid reader. To address this issue, we propose a novel privacy-preserving estimation scheme, termed as MEAS, which provides an active RF countermeasure against the estimation from invalid readers. MEAS comprises of two components, an Estimation Interference Device (EID) and two well-designed Interference Blanking Estimators (IBE). EID is deployed with the tags to actively generate interfering signals, which introduce sufficiently large estimation errors to invalid or malicious readers. Using a secret interference factor shared with EID, a valid reader can perform accurate estimation via...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICPADS
• Authors: Lei Yang, Jinsong Han, Yong Qi, Cheng Wang, Zhuo Li, Qingsong Yao, Ying Chen, Xiao Zhong
• Keywords: Cardinality Estimation, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Estimation, Estimation Scheme, ICPADS 2010