NSF gives University of Virginia researchers a million good reasons to improve RFID security, privacy

The National Science Foundation has awarded University of Virginia researchers $1 million to make RFID technology more secure.

Among concerns: RFID-enabled medical devices, like pacemakers, have been implanted but don’t necessarily have security built in. Tough encryption has been too expensive to built into the lowest cost chips, the ones that are used most commonly.

“The ultimate goal is to make the cost (of including encryption) as close to zero as possible,” said David Evans, an associate professor of computer science in the university’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The University of Arkansas is among other schools putting bigtime resources into improving RFID, and we recognized its lab in our recent slideshow on 10 really cool university network labs.