Deckard: A System to Detect Change of RFID Tag Ownership

Abstract

Change of tag ownership compromises the security goals of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). When an attacker clones or steals an authorized subject’s tag, they are willingly granted access as RFID assumes the owner of a tag is always the authorized entity. We present Deckard, a new approach to preventing change of tag ownership. Deckard uses the principles of intrusion detection to look for anomalous behavior which may indicate a change of tag ownership has occurred. We have evaluated its performance in detecting synthesized attacks inside a sanitized RFID proximity tag audit log. The results suggest that intrusion detection systems can be used in RFID, although the weaknesses of statistical anomaly detection are also apparent when used on RFID data. We conclude with a call to further research of intrusion detection in RFID systems.