Soo-Cheol Kim

RFID-based indoor location tracking to ensure the safety of the elderly in smart home environments

In recent years, the number of elderly people living alone has grown rapidly. This increases the need for indoor healthcare services that help elderly residents live a safe and independent life. There has been increasing interest in indoor ubiquitous healthcare (U-Healthcare) applications that monitor the elderly unobtrusively via sensors and that warn them or healthcare providers of abnormal conditions. In U-Healthcare applications, automatically locating and tracking users who move around a building is a fundamental feature. Outdoor location sensing technologies such as the global positioning systems are not suitable for use in indoor environments, such as “smart home” applications, because their indoor-based location sensing lacks accuracy. This paper proposes an indoor U-Healthcare system that uses radio-frequency identification technology to accurately locate and track the elderly. The proposed system provides real-time monitoring of elderly people’s whereabouts. In addition, it analyzes their locations in association with time slots and the length of time they stay in the same place, thus inferring information such as movement patterns, ranges, and frequencies. This information is used to determine elderly people’s well-being and to warn family or healthcare workers of any potential problems. The proposed indoor U-Healthcare system improves the quality and convenience of care delivered to elderly people.

MARP: mobile agent for RFID privacy protection

Recently many researchers in various fields has noticed RFID system. RFID system has many advantages more than other automatic identification system. However, it has some consumer privacy problems, such as location tracking and disclosure of personal information. Most of related works have focused on the cryptographic scheme for the RFID tag and the reader. In this paper, a proxy agent scheme using personal mobile device for the privacy protection. Our MARP, mobile agent for RFID privacy protection, has strong cryptographic modules with a powerful CPU and battery system and guarantees more high-level security than other protection schemes. MARP acquires a tags secrete information partially and becomes the proxy agent of the tag which is in its sleep mode. All readers can communicate with MARP instead of the tag and can attempt authentication with MARP. Since the tag should have only one hash module in the environment of MARP, we can use the existing tag hardware with slight modification for protection consumers privacy in RFID system.

Performance improvement of hybrid tag anti‐collision protocol for radio frequency identification systems

SUMMARY Radio frequency identification (RFID), a new technology for the contactless recognition of objects, is considered an ideal solution to replace barcode systems. To make RFID technology widely applicable, it is important to resolve the ‘multiple tag identification problems’, that is, the problem of indicating tag collisions occurring when multiple RFID tags are simultaneously present in a readers field. The proposed anti-collision algorithm in this paper consists of two separate phases: distribution and recognition. The algorithm distributes tags to be read in such a way that tag collisions are reduced. In the distribution phase, the conventional ALOHA algorithm is used with a newly added command. When there are several occurrences of collision or no-response in a round, a new round is initiated by adjusting the frame size on the basis of the estimated number of tags. ALOHA-based algorithms have the weakness of not being able to guarantee a 100% tag identification rate. Hence, the proposed algorithm uses a tree-based algorithm in the recognition phase in order to eliminate this problem. In addition, the reversed ID approach is employed to ensure efficient tag identification. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm takes less tag identification time than the conventional algorithms, thereby increasing RFID system efficiency. Copyright

A hybrid user authentication protocol for mobile IPTV service

IPTV, a technological convergence that combines communication and broadcasting technologies, delivers customized, interactive TV content and other multimedia information over wired and wireless connections. Providing secure access to IPTV services calls for authentication, without proper and secure authentication mechanisms, an individual impersonating a subscriber could steal a service. This paper proposes a new authentication protocol to authenticate IPTV users. The authors based the proposed protocol, a hybrid authentication protocol providing lightweight, personalized user authentication, on RFID (radio-frequency identification) and USIM (Universal Subscriber Identity Module) technologies. In the proposed protocol, USIM performs highly personalized authentication, and the authenticated subscriber’s RFID tags can have a temporary authority to execute authentication. These RFID tags become Agent Tags authorized to authenticate subscribers. Agent Tags identify and authenticate themselves to RFID readers in the set-top box, thus, simplifying the authentication process.

eMARP: Enhanced Mobile Agent for RFID Privacy Protection and Forgery Detection

We are sure that RFID system should be a widely used automatic identification system because of its various advantages and applications. However, many people know that invasion of privacy in RFID system is a still critical problem that makes it difficult to be used widely. Many works for solving this problem have focused on developing light-weight cryptographic modules inside of an RFID tag and building communication protocols with the reader or the back-end server. Another approach is use of proxy agents that control communications between the tag and the reader for protecting privacy. In this paper, we present an enhanced version of MARP scheme. We modified the original MARP scheme for reducing the probability of preventing attackers eavesdropping and for reducing the communication number of tags. And back-end servers can authenticate mobile agents more easily using public key cryptography in this scheme. Enhanced MARP scheme guarantees not only privacy protection but also forgery detection, and it only needs slight modification in the current tag hardware.

Improvement of collaborative filtering using rating normalization

With the advent of the Internet, the types and amount of information one can access have increased dramatically. In today’s overwhelming information environment, recommendation systems that quickly analyze large amounts of available information and help users find items of interest are increasingly needed. This paper proposes an improvement of an existing preference prediction algorithm to increase the accuracy of recommendation systems. In a recommendation system, prediction of items preferred by users is based on their ratings. However, individual users with the same degree of satisfaction to an item may give different ratings to the item. We intend to make more precise preference prediction by perceiving differences in users’ rating dispositions. The proposed method consists of two processes of perceiving users’ rating dispositions with clustering and of performing rating normalization according to such rating dispositions. The experimental results show that our method yields higher performance than ordinary collaborative filtering approach.

Hash-Based RFID Tag Mutual Authentication Scheme with Retrieval Efficiency

RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) system is apromising automatic identification technology that usecommunication via radio waves to identify and track movingobjects. RFID systems, however, are susceptible to a variety ofsecurity problems and fundamental solutions to RFID securityvulnerabilities have not yet been proposed. This paperproposes an RFID tag mutual authentication scheme thatresists security threats posed by inherent characteristics oflow-cost RFID systems. The proposed scheme utilize themodulo operation to improve the efficiency of tag retrieval inthe back-end server and employs the hash function to provideenhanced security.

Personalized IPTV content recommendation for social network group

This paper proposes an IPTV content recommendation system that recommends TV content to the viewers by exploiting social groups in online social networks. To provide increased convenience to IPTV viewers, the proposed recommendation system automatically forms groups of users whose TV preferences are similar and predicts recommendations for such groups.

RFID System Security Analysis, Response Strategies and Research Directions

Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) system is a contactless automatic identification system using small, low-cost RFID tags. It enables recognition of the tag information via radio frequency communication, by attaching an RFID tag to an animate or inanimate object. Therefore, RFID system expected widely used in the object recognition and u-healthcare. The most important problem with an RFID system is that an adversary can access the tag information, which gives rise to privacy violation and forgery. In this respect, this paper defines the causes of the security threats occurring in RFID system and defines strategies to respond to the threats and related requirements. We review and analyze existing researches in order to present problems and propose research directions.

Protecting Your Privacy with a Mobile Agent Device in RFID Environment

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology is a contactless automatic identification technology using radio frequency. For this RFID technology to be widely spread, the problem of privacy invasion should be solved. There are many research works in progress to solve the RFID privacy problems. Most of works for solving this problem have focused on developing light-weight cryptographic modules which can be embedded into RFID tags, but some of them used a proxy agent approach that control communications between the tag and the reader for protecting user privacy. The later approach is very useful and practical in terms of manufacturing low-cost tag hardware. However, all schemes of this approach have some problems in ownership transfer and forgery detection. In this paper, we are focusing on the proxy agent approach and we suggest an advanced agent scheme that guarantees not only privacy protection but also forgery detection. And our scheme is more scalable than other agent schemes so far.