RFID technology has established itself in many sectors of human activity, including security and access systems. Just at this context, the demands on the hardware design in terms of its electromagnetic compatibility become critical. This paper provides a description of an immunity test against the electrostatic discharge according to the standard EN 61000-4-2 that was applied to an RFID reader which was primarily intended to be applied in access systems, employing the on-board recognition of the RFID tags. It was shown that such device can be endangered by the external electrostatic pulse; the findings described in this paper may be beneficial for the developers of the hardware for the RFID devices.

Abstract. This paper provides a description of an immunity test against the electrostatic discharge according to the standard EN 61000-4-2 that was applied to an RFID reader. The RFID reader was primarily developed for access systems, employing the on-board recognition of the RFID tags. The results obtained by the test are described hereby as well as the discussion on the security of this solution. The results of this experiment are beneficial for the developers of RFID devices, as these devices are endangered by the electrostatic discharge brought by their users. The hereby described results also shown a security hole in a simple access system based on the RFID technology. Details can be found in the paper.