Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2009/481

PPS: Privacy Preserving Statistics using RFID Tags

Erik-Oliver Blass and Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui and Refik Molva

Abstract: As RFID applications are entering our daily life, many new security and privacy challenges arise. However, current research in RFID security focuses mainly on simple authentication and privacy-preserving identication. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of widening the scope of RFID security and privacy by introducing a new application scenario. The suggested application consists of computing statistics on private properties of individuals stored in RFID tags. The main requirement is to compute global statistics while preserving the privacy of individual readings. PPS assures the privacy of properties stored in each tag through the combination of homomorphic encryption and aggregation at the readers. Re-encryption is used to prevent tracking of users. The readers scan tags and forward the aggregate of their encrypted readings to the back-end server. The back-end server then decrypts the aggregates it receives and updates the global statistics accordingly. PPS is provably privacypreserving. Moreover, tags can be very simple since they are not required to perform any kind of computation, but only to store data.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / RFID, privacy, unlinkability, statistics

Date: received 28 Sep 2009, last revised 4 Feb 2011

Contact author: erik-oliver blass at eurecom fr

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20110204:154105 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2009/481

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