Hermann Seuschek

Securing disaster supply chains with cryptography enhanced RFID

Purpose – Humanitarian logistics is an essential element of disaster management and it presents many challenges due to the unique disaster relief environment. The paper describes the main features and challenges of humanitarian logistics and the potential role of technology. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been increasingly considered to improve the efficiency of supply chain management. Security is an important requirement for disaster management. The purpose of this paper is to propose and describe the application of secure RFID technology to improve the management and security of relief supply chains.Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the challenges of disaster of supply chains and how secure RFID can address them in the overall framework of disaster management.Findings – The paper describes the efficiency of the crypotgraphic algorithm used in the design of the secure RFID, the system architecture and the deployment workflow.Practical implications – The establishmen...

The use of secure RFID to support the resolution of emergency crises

The resolution of emergency crises and natural disasters is heavily dependent, among other things, on efficient supply chain management to bring the necessary material to the first time responders. The supply chain used in the resolution of emergency crises must have capabilities of agility and flexibility to respond to the challenges, which are typical of these scenarios. Emergency crises are often characterized by a chaotic environment and by a general lack of infrastructures, which are usually degraded or destroyed as a consequence of the source of crisis. Such conditions make the task to maintain the supply chain and provide the delivery of correct equipment and goods to the right places and at the right time more difficult. RFID has been increasingly considered, in the context of emergency crisis scenarios, to address the described challenges and to improve the supply chain. An important requirement is security. RFID devices must not be tampered with and they should be resistant to security attacks (e.g. spoofing, eavesdropping, cloning) to ensure that the supply chain is not disrupted by criminals and that cargo and goods are not stolen. In this context, this paper will present the application and benefits of the recent technological breakthroughs developed by Siemens and Infineon Technologies in the field of secure RFID. This paper will analyze practical utilization of this type of device in the resolution of emergency crises to guarantee the reliability of sealing of the goods and their identification. The establishment of a logistics tracking framework based on secure RFID has the potential to greatly increase the effectiveness of future emergency crises response operations.

Simulating a Multi-domain RFID System for Replacement Part Tracking

The efficient and reliable handling of replacement parts is of high importance for airlines. It can be supported by attaching an RFID tag to replacement parts that stores data identifying unambiguously the replacement part and further information about its installation and maintenance. Security is essential so that only authenticated and authorized entities can read and modify data according to the defined access permissions. Although the information is managed in a decentralized way, it has anyhow to be synchronized with the airline’s backend database finally.This paper describes data format, certificate management and access control when using these passive RFID tags in a multi-domain scenario for replacement part tracking within the avionics industry. The demonstrator architecture design is described for simulating replacement part tracking. It allows simulating use cases of the multi-domain RFID system for replacement part tracking. Both simulated and real RFID tags can be used in the simulation.

Secure RFID for Humanitarian Logistics

Extreme events like hurricanes, flooding and earthquakes cause massive disruption to society, including large death tolls and property damage. In recent years, many events like the Katrina disaster Katrina (2004) have shown the importance of efficient disaster management to alleviate the resulting pain and suffering and to mitigate the consequences of the disaster. Disaster management includes a large set of activities including the care of the survivors needs, protection of assets from any further damage and provision of shelter, water, food, and medicines to dislocated people. The creation of an effective disaster supply chain to deliver necessary goods to disaster relief organizations is an essential function of disaster management. This function is also called humanitarian logistics. Humanitarian logistics is a wide term that covers the operations concerning supply chain strategies, processes, and technologies that will maintain the flow of goods and material needed for the humanitarian. The management of the supply chain in disaster relief operations is considered an essential element in the resolution of a crisis since the Tsunami in South East Asia (December, 26th 2004) and the Katrina Hurricane (August, 2005). The scale of these disasters is huge both in geographical size and in severity. The Katrina Hurricane affected 92,000 square miles of land Gardner (2006) and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes. In a recent report Fritz (2005), it was highlighted that most of the organizations involved in the 2004 tsunami disaster were lacking in supply chain expertise and technology. Humanitarian logistics is indeed a very challenging task for many organizations for a number or reasons, which will be described in this chapter. For example, natural disasters are usually characterized by a chaotic environment and by a general lack of transportation infrastructures, which are usually degraded or destroyed. Many different organizations may be involved with no a-priori coordination plan defined. All these challenges make the task of humanitarian relief organizations very difficult. Traditional mechanisms and processes implemented in commercial supply chains may not be directly adapted to humanitarian logistics because of these challenges and because of the different operational requirements. Timing constraints are much more severe in disaster supply chain than commercial supply chains because of the potential loss in human lives and assets if essential equipment is not distributed in time. In other cases, specific processes and technologies can be tailored to humanitarian logistics. Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology has already been identified as a powerful Secure RFID for Humanitarian Logistics