Combating Tag Cloning with COTS RFID Devices

Abstract

In RFID systems, a cloning attack is to fabricate one or more replicas of a genuine tag, so that these replicas behave exactly the same as the genuine tag and fool the reader for getting legal authorization, leading to potential financial loss or reputation damage for the corporations. These replicas are called clone tags. Although many advanced solutions have been proposed to combat cloning attack, they need to either modify the MAC- layer protocols or increase extra hardware resources, which cannot be deployed on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID devices for practical use. In this paper, we take a fresh attempt to counterattack tag cloning based on COTS RFID devices and the universal C1G2 standard, without any software redesign or hardware augment needed. The basic idea is to use the RF signal profile to characterize each tag. Since these physical-layer data are measured by the reader and susceptible to various environmental factors, they are hard to be estimated by the attackers; let alone be cloned. Even so, we assert that it is challenging to identify clone tags as the signal data from a genuine tag and its clones are all mixed together. Besides, the tag moving has a great impact on the measured RF signals. To overcome these challenges, we propose a clustering-based scheme that detects the cloning attack in the still scene and a chain- based scheme for clone detection in the dynamic scene, respectively. Extensive experiments on COTS RFID devices demonstrate that the detection accuracy of our approaches reaches 99.8% in a still case and 99.3% in a dynamic scene.