Applications of Radio Frequency Identification Technology and Security Issues in Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management (SCM) systems provide the ability of information sharing and interpretation of contextual information to businesses and help their day-to-day operations. This chapter presents an introduction to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and its applications in SCM. The chapter also describes the technical basics of RFID systems and examines several industry-specific applications of this technology to SCM to provide crucial implementation reviews. Next, the chapter emphasizes many inherent vulnerabilities of this pervasive computing technology in the context of security and privacy. This chapter presents a classification mechanism for risks that RFID networks come across by describing a categorization of RFID attacks, describing their main characteristics, and discussing possible countermeasures. The chapter aims to classify the existing weakness of RFID communication so that an appropriate understanding of RFID attacks can be realised, and subsequently, more effective procedures can be deployed to combat these attacks.