Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has evolved from a narrowly defined supply-chain automation tool into a foundational technology for ubiquitous computing, logistics, identity management, retail, transportation, and cyber-physical systems. This expansion has also transformed RFID into a critical site of security and privacy risk. Because RFID tags are inexpensive, resource-constrained, and often deployed at massive scale, they are exposed to a wide range of adversarial threats including tracking, cloning, eavesdropping, unauthorized interrogation, replay attacks, ownership fraud, and covert surveillance. At the same time, RFID infrastructures are increasingly integrated with sensitive economic and governmental processes such as banknotes, passports, retail authentication, and access control systems. These developments have created a structural tension between the demand for frictionless identification and the need for strong cryptographic protection and privacy preservation.

This article provides a comprehensive and theoretically grounded investigation of RFID security and privacy grounded strictly in the canonical technical and cryptographic literature provided in the reference set. Drawing on foundational work on RFID architectures, privacy threats, cryptographic primitives, authentication protocols, and ownership transfer mechanisms, the article constructs a unified analytical framework for understanding how trust is produced, attacked, and repaired in RFID ecosystems. The study integrates system-level perspectives from EPCglobal and MIT Auto-ID with cryptographic approaches such as universal re-encryption, minimalist mutual authentication, and Gen2-compliant privacy-preserving protocols.

Through detailed theoretical elaboration, this article demonstrates that RFID security is not simply a technical problem but a socio-technical one, where the material constraints of tags, the economic imperatives of mass deployment, and the political importance of personal data intersect. The results show that while significant progress has been made in authentication and privacy protection, structural vulnerabilities remain, especially in ownership transfer, ultra-lightweight cryptography, and large-scale interoperability. The article concludes by identifying future research directions that are required to reconcile scalability, usability, and cryptographic rigor in next-generation RFID infrastructures.