Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

RFID news

From October 2006 all US passports will contain RFID chips. The US administration believes that such a move will help improve air travel security; privacy advocates are angered by the move. The 64KB chips will allow officials to electronically read information from the passport such as name, date of birth and the photograph.

Marks & Spencer scanned their 10-millionth RFID food tray in late September. M&S were an early adopter of RFID three years ago, using tags in trays transporting fresh food from suppliers to depots. There are now 4.5 million trays in the M&S supply chain, with 100 suppliers. Produce from many suppliers can be scanned at the same time, saving time and money. Data is used to confirm deliveries and automate procurement four times faster than previous barcode scanning methods. RFID tags are alos in use at other large companies such as Ikea and GlaxoSmithKline.

Virgin Atlantic is to test a RFID tagging system to track parts at its Heathrow store. When Virgin takes delivery of the Airbus A380 in 2008, RFID technology will be tested in manufacturing and maintenance. They will look at the possibility of reducing stock levels. The trial will also involved building a wireless local area network to enable data captured by RFID to be transmitted to Virgin's Oracle database.

Microsoft says it is to develop and infrastructure to support RFID deployment. The indfrastructure will be built on its .net framework, and is designed to be embedded in third party applications or used on its own. Microsoft believe that RFID deployment is being hindered by the cost of integration and the limited scope to cleanse data. Microsoft is aiming for seamless integration of sensor data with applications and business processes at low cost.

Paperchase, the high-street staitionery retailer is to introduce RFID into its supply chain. It will use RFID with wireless handheld devices to deliver real-time information to warehouse staff. This will help Paperchase move from labour-intensive practices to instant updates and stock checks. The retailer has around 70 shops and several thousand products, giving a large amount of diverse data. The intorduction of RFID has been made possible by an upgrade of front and back-office IT systems.

Metro Group, the world's thrid largest retailer, has demonstrated the next generation of RFID technology. Called EPC Generation 2 RFID, the standard is said to be more accurate than that in current use. The new tags are better for depolyment, being more resilient and less prone to failure. Alongside Tesco, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, Metro is one the highest profile early adopters of RFID technology. They aim to test performance of the new technology as their next step.

According to research, there are more RFID trials being conducted inthe UK than any other country in Europe. Around 10.4% of all trials in Europe are in the UK. The US leads the way globally, but RFID has made good progress in the UK because UK companies sell more brands than their European neighbours. Now RFID vendors are starting to look for ways to make money rather than running trials.

To improve its online shopping service, Tesco is considering using RFID technology. Having last year upgraded its wireless picking and delivery system in 300 stores, the store is now deciding whether to include the scanning of RFID-tagged items or pallets. Traditional barcode functionality in terminals can be applied to RFID scanning. As announced in January 2005 Tesco's RFID trials are to extend to track transportation of non-food items from warehouses to stores.

Research indicates that the global market for RFID technology will be worth about £14.1bn by 2015. The rapidly growing market will reach £3.8bn by 2008. such as M&S and Tesco have been adopting the technology, but other industries will become major drivers in the future with tagging of baggage, animals, books and tickets. It is predicted that 3.1bn tags will be used on pallets and cases by 2006. There will also be an increase in chipless RFID, in which the tages do not contain any silicon, such as in smartcards and tickets. There will also be a large market for RFID in prison and parole services, passports, livestock and healthcare.

French tyre manufacturer Michelin is testing tyres with RFID chips, embedding them into a tyre's side wall. The tag is based on new standards for the auto industry to keep it more in line with shops and the US Department of Defense. The Automotive Industry Group's Tyre and Wheel Label and RFID Standard B-11 has recently been revised. Sales this year are expected to be 323m units, increasing to 356m by 2009. RFID tags are expected to help extend the wear because they can be quickly checked when a car comes in for a service.

History of RFID tags

Some people think that the first known device was invented by Leon Theremin, as an espionage tool for the Russian Government, in 1945, but the first real usage of RFID devices dates before that.

During World War II in the UK, RFID devices were used to distinguish returning English airplanes from German ones as radar was only able to signal the presence of a plane, not the kind of plane it was.

The first work exploring RFID is perhaps the landmark 1948 paper by Harry Stockman, entitled "Communication by Means of Reflected Power" (Proceedings of the IRE, pp1196-1204, October 1948). Stockman predicted that " ...considerable research and development work has to be done before the remaining basic problems in reflected-power communication are solved, and before the field of useful applications is explored." It required thirty years of advances in many different fields before RFID became a reality.

Types of RFID tags

RFID tags can be either active or passive.
Passive RFID tags do not have their own power supply: the minute electrical current induced in the antenna by the incoming radio-frequency scan provides enough power for the tag to send a response. Due to power and cost concerns, the response of a passive RFID tag is necessarily short, typically just an ID number (GUID). Without a power supply the device is quite small: commercially available products exist that can be embedded under the skin. As of 2004, the smallest such devices commercially available measured 0.4 mm × 0.4 mm, and thinner than a sheet of paper; such devices are practically invisible. Passive tags have practical read ranges that vary from about 10 mm up to about 5 metres.

Active RFID tags must have a power source, and may have longer ranges and larger memories than passive tags, as well as the ability to store additional information sent by the transceiver. At present, the smallest active tags are about the size of a coin. Many active tags have practical ranges of tens of metres, and a battery life of up to several years.

As passive tags are much cheaper to manufacture, the vast majority of RFID tags in existence are of the passive variety. The aim is to produce tags for less than USD0.05 to make widespread RFID tagging commercially viable.

There are four different kinds of tags commonly in use, their differences based on the level of their radio frequency: Low frequency tags (between 125 to 134 kilohertz), High frequency tags (13.56 megahertz), UHF tags (868 to 956 megahertz), and Microwave tags (2.45 gigahertz).

See also for some Transponder devices which deliver a similar function, and contactless chipcards.

Current usage

Low-frequency RFID tags are commonly used for animal identification, beer keg tracking, and automobile key-and-lock, anti-theft systems. Pets are often embedded with small chips so that they may be returned to their owners if lost. In the United States, two RFID frequencies are used: 125kHz (the original standard) and 134.5kHz, the international standard.

High-frequency RFID tags are used in library book or bookstore tracking, pallet tracking, building access control, airline baggage tracking, and apparel item tracking. High-frequency tags are widely used in identification badges, replacing earlier magnetic stripe cards. These badges need only be held within a certain distance of the reader to authenticate the holder.

UHF RFID tags are commonly used commercially in pallet and container tracking, and truck and trailer tracking in shipping yards.

Microwave RFID tags are used in long range access control for vehicles, an example being General Motors' OnStar system.

Some toll booths, such as California's FasTrak system, use RFID tags for electronic toll collection. The tags are read as vehicles pass; the information is used to debit the toll from a prepaid account. The system helps to speed traffic through toll plazas.

Sensors such as seismic sensors may be read using RFID transceivers, greatly simplifying remote data collection.

In January 2003, Michelin announced that it has begun testing RFID transponders embedded into tyres. After a testing period that is expected to last 18 months, the manufacturer will offer RFID-enabled tyres to car-makers. Their primary purpose is tyre-tracking in compliance with the United States Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation Act (TREAD Act).

Cards embedded with RFID chips are widely use as electronic cash, e.g. Octopus Card in Hong Kong and the Netherlands to pay fares in mass transit systems and/or retails.

In August 2004, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRH) approved a USD415,000 contract to trial the tracking technology with Alanco Technologies. Inmates will wear "wristwatch-sized" transmitters that can detect if prisoners have been trying to remove them and send an alert to prison computers. This project is not the first such rollout of tracking chips in US prisons. Facilities in Michigan, California and Illinois already employ the technology.

Implantable RFID "chips", originally designed for animal tagging are being used and contemplated for humans as well. Applied Digital Solutions proposes their chip's "unique under-the-skin format" as a solution to identity fraud, secure building access, computer access, storage of medical records, anti-kidnapping initiatives and a variety of law-enforcement applications. Combined with sensors to monitor body functions, the Digital Angel device could provide monitoring for patients. The Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain uses an implantable Verichip to identify their VIP customers, who in turn use it to pay for drinks. The Mexico City police department has implanted approximately 170 of their police officers with the Verichip, to allow access to police databases and possibly track them in case of kidnapping.

Potential uses

RFID tags are often envisioned as a replacement for UPC or EAN bar-codes, having a number of important advantages over the older bar-code technology. RFID codes are long enough that every RFID tag may have a unique code, while UPC codes are limited to a single code for all instances of a particular product. The uniqueness of RFID tags means that a product may be individually tracked as it moves from location to location, finally ending up in the consumer's hands. This may help companies to combat theft and other forms of product loss. It has also been proposed to use RFID for point-of-sale store checkout to replace the cashier with an automatic system, with the option of erasing all RFID tags at checkout and paying by credit card or inserting money into a payment machine. This has to a limited extent already been implemented at some stores[1] (http://www.ncr.com/repository/articles/pdf
/sa_selfcheckout_integratedsolutions.pdf).

An organization called EPCglobal is working on a proposed international standard for the use of RFID and the Electronic Product Code (EPC) in the identification of any item in the supply chain for companies in any industry, anywhere in the world. The organization's board of governors includes representatives from EAN International, Uniform Code Council, The Gillette Company, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, and Auto-ID Labs.

In July 2004, the Food and Drug Administration issued a ruling that essentially begins a final review process that will determine whether hospitals can use RFID systems to identify patients and/or permit relevant hospital staff to access medical records.

Many somewhat far-fetched uses, such as allowing a refrigerator to track the expiration dates of the food it contains, have also been proposed, but few have moved beyond the prototype stage.

Controversy

How would you like it if, for instance, one day you realized your underwear was reporting on your whereabouts? [2] (http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5065388.html) - California Senator Debra Bowen, at a 2003 hearing. The use of RFID technology has engendered considerable controversy and even product boycotts. The four main privacy concerns regarding RFID are:

• The purchaser of an item will not necessarily be aware of the presence of the tag or be able to remove it;
• The tag can be read at a distance without the knowledge of the individual;
• If a tagged item is paid for by credit card or in conjunction with use of a loyalty card, then it would be possible to tie the unique ID of that item to the identity of the purchaser; and
• Tags create, or are proposed to create, globally unique serial numbers for all products, even though this creates privacy problems and is completely unnecessary for most applications.

Most concerns revolve around the fact that RFID tags affixed to products remain functional even after the products have been purchased and taken home, and thus can be used for surveillance, and other nefarious purposes unrelated to their supply chain inventory functions. Although RFID tags are only officially intended for short-distance use, they can be interrogated from greater distances by anyone with a high-gain antenna, potentially allowing the contents of a house to be scanned at a distance. Even short range scanning is a concern if all the items detected are logged in a database every time a person passes a reader, or if it is done for nefarious reasons (e.g., a mugger using a hand-held scanner to obtain an instant assessment of the wealth of potential victims). With permanent RFID serial numbers, an item leaks unexpected information about a person even after disposal; for example, items that are resold, or given away, enable mapping of a person's social network.

Another privacy issue is due to RFID's support for a singulation (anti-collision) protocol. This is the means by which a reader enumerates all the tags responding to it without them mutually interfering. The structure of the most common version of this protocol is such that all but the last bit of each tag's serial number can be deduced by passively eavesdropping on just the reader's part of the protocol. Because of this, whenever RFID tags are near to readers, the distance at which a tag's signal can be eavesdropped is irrelevant; what counts is the distance at which the much more powerful reader can be received. Just how far this can be depends on the type of the reader, but in the extreme case some readers have a maximum power output (4 W) that could be received from tens of kilometres away.

The potential for privacy violations with RFID was demonstrated by its use in a pilot program by the Gillette Company, which conducted a "smart shelf" test at a Tesco in Cambridge. They automatically photographed shoppers taking RFID-tagged safety razors off the shelf, to see if the technology could be used to deter shoplifting. [3] (http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=5363)

In January 2004 a group of privacy advocates was invited to METRO "Future Store" in Germany, where a RFID pilot project was implemented. It was uncovered by accident that METRO "Payback" customer loyalty cards contained RFID tags with customer IDs, the fact that was not disclosed either to customers receiving the cards, or this group of privacy advocates. This happened despite assurances of METRO that no customer identification data was tracked and all RFID usage was clearly disclosed. [4] ( http://www.spychips.com/metro/overview.html)

The controversy was furthered by the accidental exposure of a proposed Auto-ID consortium public relations campaign that was designed to "neutralize opposition" and get consumers to "resign themselves to the inevitability of it" whilst merely pretending to address their concerns. [5] ( http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/security_gaffe.html)

The standard proposed by EPCglobal includes privacy-related guidelines for the use of RFID-based EPC. These guidelines [6] (http://www.epcglobalinc.org/public_policy/public_policy_guidelines.html) include the requirement to give consumers clear notice of the presence of EPC and to inform them of the choice that they have to discard, disable or remove EPC tags. These guidelines are non-binding, and only partly meet the joint position statement ( http://www.spychips.com/jointrfid_position_paper.html) of 46 multi-national consumer rights and privacy groups.

In 2004, Lukas Grunwald released a computer program RFDump which with suitable hardware allows reading and reprogramming the metadata contained in an RFID tag, although not the unchangeable serial number built into each tag. He said consumers could use this program to protect themselves, although it would also have significant malicious uses.