SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project investigates the feasibility of implementing strong public key cryptography within passive UHF RFID tags for the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry incurs over $40B in annual losses due to drug counterfeiting and divergence which directly threatens patient safety. The FDA is urging the industry to adopt RFID technology to mitigate these threats but a large exposure remains if the security of the data on the tag can not be ensured. Today's tags cannot protect the user from unauthorized reading, copying, or tracking due to the lack of onboard security. SecureRF has developed a security protocol which is thousands of times smaller and faster than any other cryptographic function. The anticipated result of Phase 1 is to determine the feasibility of implementing this protocol within passive EPCglobal Gen 2 UHF RFID tags. Pharmaceuticals must be protected from counterfeiting and theft which impacts public safety and drives up consumer drug prices. Without security, the FDA recommended use of RFID tags could introduce new societal threats including patient privacy concerns under HIPAA. Additional commercial value from this project will come from high value asset tracking, contactless payment systems, Defense and Homeland Security including border security, and Near Field Communications. The RFID market is estimated at $1.5-2.0 billion with a projected growth to around $26.9 billion in 2015. If successful, a new low-footprint authentication protocol to address these commercial opportunities will be developed

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and prototype passive UHF RFID tags implemented with strong public key cryptography for the pharmaceutical industry. Implementing cryptography directly on passive tags is a significant innovation as current security solutions cannot address this need effectively. The FDA is urging the United States pharmaceutical industry to adopt RFID technology to assist with the enforcement of pedigree laws and reduce drug counterfeiting. Today's RFID tags, however, cannot protect the user from unauthorized reading, copying, or tracking because they lack onboard security. Thus, a large exposure remains since the security of the data on the tag cannot be ensured. SecureRF is developing a security protocol which holds the promise of beings thousands of times smaller and faster than any other cryptographic function. Secured tags will enable drug manufacturers and distributors to ensure patient safety and drug integrity as well as improve their supply chain process. This SBIR project targets the pharmaceutical industry supply chain which handles over 4 billion U.S. prescriptions annually. Pharmaceuticals must be protected from counterfeiting and theft which impacts public safety and drives up consumer drug prices. Without onboard security, the FDA's recommended use of RFID tags could inadvertently introduce new societal threats including patient privacy concerns under HIPAA. The use of secure RFID tags will also enable the pharmaceutical industry to run their supply chain more efficiently. Additional commercial value from this project will come from developing secure products for high value asset tracking and contact-less payment systems in addition to military and Homeland Security needs. Existing cryptographic algorithms cannot provide strong authentication and data protection on resource-constrained computing devices like passive RFID tags. This SBIR proposal offers a breakthrough with broad-based significance that will help advance the technological understanding of public key cryptography for small, low powered computing devices.