Secure RFID login for retail scales

Spanish supermarket chain Dinosol and industry-leading scale manufacturer Bizerba rely on contemporary contactless RFID technology from evolutionID and RFID readers from Elatec for secure employee login at POS devices.

Everyone who buys meat, fruit or other groceries in the supermarket knows them, the calibrated precision scales from Bizerba. At the serving counters, they display the weight of the selected goods and print receipts for billing at the checkout. To track service behaviour and weighing processes, the employee working at the counter must log in with a personal code. In many stores, this is still done by typing in a numerical code. However, this method is not fraud-proof and it is quite prone to failure. IT departments often spend many hours a day resetting forgotten passwords.

The well-known Spanish supermarket chain Dinosol is now taking a new approach to the subject: The employee logs on to the scale at the start of work using her or his personal contactless RFID card.  The data required for a secure login procedure is stored on a Mifare DESFire EV2 transponder in an AES-encrypted and forgery-proof format. This means that each weighing operation can be clearly assigned to an employee across all branches. Logout is either manual or automatic at the end of the shift.

Service behaviour is transparently assigned to the employee

The personal login is not only used for tracking and inventory, but also for customer service: Using the QR code on each receipt, each transaction can be clearly assigned. The customer can identify the employee by picture and rate his service performance. Every employee can view these ratings at any time via an employee app.

Login is via a contactless reader with an integrated 13.56 MHz antenna. The TWN4 reader operates according to the ISO14443A+B and ISO15696 standards. The cards are DESFire EV1 / EV2 transponders with an 8-kB chip.

The new login infrastructure for a total of 800 Dinosol stores and 1,000 RFID readers come from evolutionID, the checkout app comes 100% from our partner Bizerba.  The well-known Munich-based system house is a leader in vendor-independent RFID consulting and digital identities.

“The extensive rollout at so many stores requires an absolutely functionally reliable plug-and-play solution,” explains Ali Gülüm, managing director and shareholder at evolutionID together with his business partner Markus Wittke. “The reader is delivered by us with customer-specific firmware and is immediately ready for operation after connection to the POS device without any further system changes.”

“The contactless login, with service tracking is just one of many possibilities that RFID technology and central digital identities offer today,” adds Markus Wittke. “We always focus on individual solutions because we believe that security technology must always adapt to the customer’s processes – not the other way around.”