RFID hand held devices tracing and recovery

Abstract

Hand held devices such as laptops, mobile phones and tablets are small in size and therefore easily concealable. They have a ready market and a high resale value making them an easy target for theft for their hardware value (resale) or data stored. Their use has increased as a result of computer literacy, Governments bridging the ICT divide and reduction in the cost of these devices. There is more reliant on these devices to store everything that is important and many a times without back up. As such the loss of any of these devices is not only the economic loss but the loss of valuable personal or corporate data and risk y because your personal information, your email is now in the hands of a stranger as is your internet history, which probably contains details of where you shop and bank When a device is stolen, the process of recovery is tedious costly and time consuming. The police who give an abstract once a device is stolen have challenges of the necessary tools of recovery and are also overwhelmed by the high number of thefts making the recovery rate is very low. 1 in 10 laptops will be stolen within their lifetime according to the FBI that estimates that 10% of all laptops purchased in the US will be stolen within the first year of ownership. Of those, only 3% will be recovered. (Bruce Verduyn), Barcode technology which has been used over the years for identification is now being replaced by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) (Want, 2004). Bar coding requires a line of sight to scan a printed label to identify the object whereas RFID is omnidirectional and interrogates a tag using radio frequency signals.(Davis, Geiger, Gutierrez, Heaser, & Veeramani, 2009)