RFID Cell Phone Part 2

From eWeek News Verisign plans RFID security enhancements.

After making a range of moves last year toward bolstering RFID adoption, network specialist VeriSign Inc. is now working with epcGlobal on future RFID security improvements, while also consulting enterprises about which business processes to RFID-enable in the interests of quicker ROI.

VeriSign started out 2004 by announcing that it had nailed down a contract with RFID standards body epcGlobal for running root directory services that allow the use of RFID tag data on large networks.

Another approach—possibly advantageous to pharmaceutical and food manufacturing firms, for instance—calls for the use of RFID in gaining "proof of delivery" benefits.

VeriSign's RFID announcements last year also included a joint demo with Nokia around possible consumer-oriented RFID applications, along with plans in the areas of outsourcing Internet-based RFID networking for enterprise customers and support for RFID application development.

On the EPC Network, every company will ultimately have a server running its own ONS (Object Naming Services), as well as EPC-IS (EPC-Information Services) servers containing data about their own products.

The ONS servers will send lookup requests for EPC numbers to the EPC-IS servers. Companies will be permitted to either run their own EPC-IS services or to outsource these services.

Would the data that these lookup requests be valuable?

As Strzelec sees it, RFID's ONS services are similar to the DNS (Domain Naming Services) VeriSign already operates on the Internet through its data centers. "We run the intelligent infrastructure for .com and .net [Internet domains]," he said.

So this means Verisign will assign a web address to every RFID tag.

VeriSign's pilot demo with Nokia focused on futuristic scenarios that would let consumers access RFID data from cell phones. Nokia's 5140 phone already comes with an RFID reader.

The cell phone will scan an RFID tag, send the request to a server, the server says that tags domain is "www.xyz.com", and then the cellphone displays that site.

I think theres some IP that involves a bunch of this process.