Far from being a new technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) has its roots in identify friend or foe (IFF) systems deployed by the military since World War II. Almost all of the issues facing current RFID systems (sniffing, tracking, spoofing, and so on) have precedents identified when these early systems were deployed. This paper provides an excellent historical perspective for understanding the issues surrounding RFID technology, and a context for developing strategies for managing this technology in the future.

The breadth of RFID application domains is impressive, from supply chain management, automatic payment systems, and access control, to tracking our pets and controlling the transmission of disease in the food chain through the monitoring of the movement of animals in the food chain.

The management of RFID tags and their data also raises many issues related to civil liberties. Privacy (as opposed to security) was not generally an issue for military users of RFID; current technology, however, may allow individuals to be tracked even without using unique identifiers (tracking a recurring group of unassociated tags), or allow information to be collected by unauthorized readers.

Even some familiar concepts have nontraditional dimensions with RFID. For example, a denial of service attack could be performed by flooding a reader with multiple responses from surreptitious devices, but also by shielding the RFID tag to prevent it from being scanned by a legitimate reader. (Interestingly, it is now illegal to wear aluminum underwear in Colorado, if the intent is to defeat theft protection devices.)

Overall, this paper offers the reader both a technically informative and a historically enlightening perspective on RFID systems, and some thoughtful insights on the future directions of the technology. While changes in the technology mean that not all of the solutions that have been developed for military applications will apply, they do provide a useful perspective as we plan for new RFID applications.