Toward Fast and Deterministic Clone Detection for Large Anonymous RFID Systems

Cloning attacks seriously impede the security of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) applications. In this paper, we tackle 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. We propose two protocols, BASE 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 re-arbitration. For DeClone to achieve detection certainty, we design breadth first tree traversal toward quickly verifying unreconciled collisions and hence the cloning attack. We validate their detection performance through analysis and simulation. The results show that BASE delivers faster detection for small systems while DeClone for large ones especially when clone ratio increases.