Survey of Security Challenges in NFC and RFID for E-Health Applications

Hospitals worldwide have implemented High Frequency (HF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) networks for supplies tracking in ER setting, in-patient identification, surgical instrument management, and other applications. Merging of Web, Near Filed Communication (NFC), and HF RFID technologies for their combined use in e-Health applications is a logical next step due to the wide availability of NFC-enabled smartphones. This article outlines some resulting security challenges. Tags are often compliant with multiple standards that operate in the same frequency range. For example, HF RFID tags have already been adopted for in-patient tracking, yet smartphone NFC reader apps can freely access data on those tags. While tag– or session–centered security protocols exist for some RFID standards (e.g. ISO/IEC 29167), no ISO security standard is currently available for HF RFID tags. In such systems, proper traffic characterization can lead to better understanding of operation under “normal” system state conditions and could potentially help to identify security breaches.