Grant: Idea to Innovation

Counterfeiting is one of the most significant sources of loss in many industries including food and beverage, pharmaceutical, consumer electronics, medical devices, retail, and IT sectors. Brand owners is looking for new technologies protecting their supply chains and tracing back the origin of counterfeit products. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system has emerged as a promising solution to combating counterfeit products since it enables automatic object identification and complements the traditional anti-counterfeiting methods. Low-cost EPC C1 Gen2 RFID system provides an efficient solution for supply chain management. However, due to the lack of appropriate security and privacy protection mechanisms, low-cost EPC C1 Gen2 tags can be cloned and user's private information can be leaked, which restrict their usage for product anti-counterfeiting currently. The proposed project aims to design and build a proof-of-concept prototype of a secure EPC C1 Gen2 RFID system based on a lightweight stream cipher WG-8 as well as a suite of privacy-preserving security protocols developed at the University of Waterloo. The resulting secure EPC C1 Gen2 RFID system is expected to be deployed in multiple industry sectors and enable brand owners to track-and-trace their supply chains and detect counterfeit products in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The prototype implementation will be critical for commercializing the anti-counterfeiting technology based on secure EPC C1 Gen2 RFID systems and generating investor interests.