Survey and remedy of the technologies used for RFID tags against counterfeiting

RFID tags such as EPC tags have been used in some commercial sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry as an anti-counterfeiting tool. RFID tags are a powerful mechanism for object identification, and can facilitate the compilation of detailed object histories and pedigrees. Since RFID tags communicate with the reader through open air in an automated, wireless manner, they are poor authenticators. Furthermore, they have a small microchip on board that offer functionality that can be used for security purposes. This chip functionality makes it possible to verify the authenticity of a product and hence to detect and prevent counterfeiting. In order to be successful for these security purposes, RFID tags have to be resistant against many attacks, in particular against cloning of the tag. Therefore, RFID tags are vulnerable to elementary cloning and counterfeiting attacks. In this paper, we survey and remedy the technologies used for RFID tags against counterfeiting. In the first section, we present an overview of the RFID tags counterfeiting issue. In the second section, we survey the existing methods which investigate how an RFID-tag can be made unclonable. In the third section, we compare and contrast the pros and cons of those existing methods and also identify the discrepancy areas which require further enhancement. In the fourth section, we propose some design principles and guidelines for improvement of the existing methods. Finally, we draw a conclusion and suggest further research direction in this field.