Deterministic Detection of Cloning Attacks for Anonymous RFID Systems

Cloning attacks seriously impede the security of radio-frequency identification (RFID) applications. This paper tackles deterministic clone detection for anonymous RFID systems without tag identifiers (IDs) as a priori. Existing clone detection protocols either cannot apply to anonymous RFID systems due to necessitating the knowledge of tag IDs or achieve only probabilistic detection with a few clones tolerated. This paper proposes three protocols—BASE, DeClone, and DeClone+—toward fast and deterministic clone detection for large anonymous RFID systems. BASE leverages the observation that clone tags make tag cardinality exceed ID cardinality. DeClone is built on a recent finding that clone tags cause collisions that are hardly reconciled through rearbitration. For DeClone to achieve detection certainty, this paper designs breadth first tree traversal toward quickly verifying unreconciled collisions and hence the cloning attack. DeClone+ further incorporates optimization techniques that promise faster clone detection when clone ratio is relatively high. The performance of the proposed protocols is validated through analysis and simulation. This paper also suggests feasible extensions to enrich their applicability to distributed design.