PriDaC: Privacy preserving data collection in sensor enabled RFID based healthcare services

The integration of sensing capability into active RFID tags has recently generated a lot of interest among the RFID community. In any sensor enabled Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system data collection is done continuously. Data collection in this context can refer to the computation of statistical means and moments, as well as other cumulative quantities that summarize the data obtained by the system. However, these systems are usually very critical and used in sensitive applications. One such application area is healthcare where sensor enabled RFID tags are used in hospitals and clinics to provide various healthcare services by collecting different environmental and physiological data. In these types of healthcare services, the leakage of any raw data may lead to privacy violation of the system and the application users (in this case patient) in general. In such sensor enabled RFID based healthcare applications, privacy preservation cannot be accomplished using different cryptographic techniques because they involve heavy computation which is not feasible for resource constrained tags. Moreover, in these types of system, it is desirable to have end-to-end security with the data decrypted only at the reader in order to avoid security vulnerabilities as much as possible. Ensuring system security and preserving data privacy are two conflicting goals. To address this problem, we propose a privacy preserving data collection technique (PriDaC) for sensor enabled RFID based healthcare application. In PriDaC the data secrecy maintenance and data privacy protection mechanisms work cooperatively. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that allows privacy preserving data collection in sensor enabled RFID systems that provides healthcare services.