Data protection in the RFID era

Various schemes use radio frequency identification (RFID) for apparel data protection, along with encryption algorithms for RFID tags. In the cryptography approach, particular vendor type of reader's public key and its unique private key should be carried by each tag, and during reading, with the help of embedded keys, readers and tags may mutually authenticate each other. The Hash Function approach is simple and straight forward to achieve data protection, where the electronic product code (EPC) in the tag is being protected, and only an authorized reader is able to unlock the tag, then lock the tag after reading the code. The Randomized Hash Lock is an extension of the Hash Lock based on pseudo-random functions (PRF), where an additional pseudo-random number is required to embed into tags for this approach. It is noted that if one can afford high-cost tags, then many capabilities can be incorporated inside tags, namely, computation, encryption and the like.