RFID communication: How well protected against reverse engineering?

The most important advantages of RFID technology are transmitting and receiving of information wirelessly as well as low implementation and maintenance costs. Such attractive features are reason for widespread usage of RFID systems - from tracking of assets to measurement of the timing during sporting events. To ensure secure operation of such systems they should have appropriate protection against reverse engineering. The contribution of this paper is a method for reverse engineering of specific RFID system used for time measurements during sporting events. Selected communication protocol aspects are discussed and their replication with off-the-shelf hardware and software with the aim to simulate a non-existing RFID tag with certain self selected ID number are presented.