Towards Quasi-Realtime Theft-Evident Mechanism for Portable Artifacts using Near-Field RFID

Portable artifacts (with or without intelligence) have come to play an important role in our daily lives. We regularly use them for storing, manipulating and exchanging information, which is critical to us. This unprecedented reliance makes them vulnerable to theft. While anti-theft mechanisms have been around for quite some time, they cannot be directly applied to portable artifacts. Moreover, many of the contemporary anti-theft mechanisms fail to provide the user with immediate evidence of occurrence of theft. This inability increases the user reaction time and makes it difficult to trace the portable artifact. In this paper, we present a model to protect portable artifacts using RFID, which provides quasi-realtime and credible evidence of occurrence of theft. We present a detailed design of the model, demonstrate proof-of-concept experimental tool and evaluate it against alternatives and threats.