I was fortunate to participate in the RFID CUSP workshop at Johns Hopkins University last week. The goal of the workshop was to bring together a broad cross-section of the RFID community in an effort to shape research agendas in service of pressing, real-world problems.

About half the speakers had government and/or industry backgrounds; the rest were RFID researchers. Among the government speakers was Hugo Teufel III, the CPO of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who spoke about his office’s work on authoring Privacy Impact Assessments for RFID-related issues such as WHTI and the EDL; he also said that he or someone from his office will go anywhere to speak on matters of privacy and homeland security (good to keep in mind!). Randy Vanderhoof of the Smart Card Alliance also gave an interesting presentation on his organization’s work with privacy – this included a note on their strong opposition to the use of EPC Gen 2 technology for WHTI.

The research portion of the program included presentations from Ari Juels and Ravi Pappu on practical key management techniques for crypto in real-world RFID applications. Christof Paar reviewed some lightweight crypto techniques which his group had developed for RFID, while Melanie Rieback and Karsten Nohl…
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