Technique for preventing DoS attacks on RFID systems

RFID systems are vulnerable to many types of malicious attacks, ranging from passive eavesdropping to complete denial of service (DoS). Hence it is becoming increasingly important to develop and design intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms for RFID. One of the ultra lightweight techniques to prevent DoS on RFID systems is the Gossamer protocol. In this paper, we show that although the Gossamer protocol is effective, it is vulnerable to one particular type of DoS, namely, DoS by de-synchronization. We further present a novel technique that extends the Gossamer protocol to prevent DoS attacks in general, and the de-synchronization DoS attack in particular. We validate our approach by a proof-of-concept simulation using a java framework.