Healthcare offers a rich palette of potential applications of RFID technology. Healthcare provides a rich palette of possible applications of RFID technology. Besides traditional uses such as tracking medical equipment and devices or access control, healthcare can benefit even more significantly from RFID technology. However, using the RFID technology in healthcare raises various problems of scalability, timely identification of tags, security, privacy, and efficient implementation in practice. That is because such systems contain many tags, operate with private personal data, and must respond promptly in concrete, practical situations to avoid malfunctions (errors in the decision process, traffic congestion, and so on). This paper discusses the fundamental requirements of RFID systems raised by healthcare and the limitations of existing schemes. Then, we propose a new RFID scheme that achieves mutual authentication, strong privacy, and constant-time identification in the HPVP model. The scheme employs a secure symmetric-key encryption scheme, making it very efficient in implementation and physically unclonable functions (PUFs) to protect the secret key against adversaries with corruption capabilities.

RFID tag corruption is a powerful attack on RFID systems, especially when it reveals the tag's temporary state. Under such an attack, no RFID scheme can achieve both security and privacy if the tags are not endowed with some hardware primitives, such as physically unclonable functions (PUFs), to prevent adversarial access to secret information. However, the use of such primitives does not constitute a guarantee for security and privacy because they do not substitute a good RFID system design. In this paper a general technique is proposed, to translate any (PUF-based) RFID scheme that is secure and private under corruption without temporary state disclosure into a PUF-based RFID scheme that is secure and private under corruption with temporary state disclosure. Our technique is optimal with respect to the tag overhead induced by PUFs. The technique is richly exemplified on both RFID and PUF-based RFID schemes. As a notable result, the first PUF-based RFID scheme is obtained, that is secure and forward private, but not destructive private, under corruption with temporary state disclosure. By using our technique, some flawed PUF-based RFID schemes that have been proposed so far in the literature can be fixed.

There is a major interest in designing RFID schemes based on symmetric-key cryptography and ensuring efficient tag identification. These requirements taken together often lead to a decrease in the degree of privacy provided by the scheme. This issue, as we know, has been treated in an ad-hoc manner so far. In this paper, we introduce the class of stateful RFID schemes with constant tag identifiers, that ensure tag identification in no more than logarithmic time. In order to study their privacy, we propose an appropriate general model obtained by constraining Vaudenay's model. We then propose two symmetric-key cryptography based RFID schemes in this class that achieve weak and destructive privacy, respectively, in addition to mutual authentication. We also discuss on the degree of privacy provided by other schemes proposed in the literature, that fall in this class.