Privacy-mode switching: Toward flexible privacy protection for RFID tags in Internet of Things

The privacy problem becomes the biggest obstacle when applying the RFID technology to personal customers usage in Internet of Things. Privacy protection is in the cost of computational overhead and feasibility loss, and necessary for privacy-sensitive usages. We propose a RFID system in which the privacy protection can be turned on or off by validate authorities. The privacy-mode switching increases diversity of RFID usage, enables RFID recycles, and has limited hardware overhead for RFID tags. Based on a symmetric-key crypto-based mutual authentication protocol called OMHSO, we describe a construction of a RFID system with flexible privacy-mode switching.