An Active Identification Overriding Attack Against RFID: Attack Strategy and Defense Design

The security of radio frequency identification (RFID) has been extensively studied in terms of eavesdropping, jamming, relay and tag cloning attacks in the literature. In this paper, we aim to explore a new type of attack, called identification overriding (IDO), in which an attacker tries into inject malicious signals to a tag's reflected signal to override the unique information transmitted by the tag. The IDO attack is designed without the knowledge of the tag's transmitted data and has low computational complexity to inject the malicious data. In addition, the attacker also minimizes the overall energy of the injection signal to make the received signal look normal to the reader. Extensive experiments show that the IDO attack maintains a high success probability generally ranging from 60% to 99% in various evaluation scenarios. Finally, we provide a defense method for the reader to detect the presence of the IDO attack from the received signal.