The Privacy Coach is an application running on a mobile phone that supports
customers in making privacy decisions when confronted with RFID tags. The
approach we take to increase customer privacy is a radical departure from the
mainstream research efforts that focus on implementing privacy enhancing
technologies on the RFID tags themselves. Instead the Privacy Coach functions
as a mediator between customer privacy preferences and corporate privacy
policies, trying to find a match between the two, and informing the user of the
outcome.
Proper privacy protection in RFID systems is important. However, many of the
schemes known are impractical, either because they use hash functions instead
of the more hardware efficient symmetric encryption schemes as a efficient
cryptographic primitive, or because they incur a rather costly key search time
penalty at the reader. Moreover, they do not allow for dynamic, fine-grained
access control to the tag that cater for more complex usage scenarios.