A Probabilistic Approach for Detecting Blocking Attack in RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a ubiquitous wireless technology which allows objects to be identified automatically. An RFID tag is a small electronic device with an antenna and has a unique serial number. In this paper, we study the use of blocker tags by malicious attackers which can cause the nearby readers not being able to successfully receive the reply messages from the RFID tags. We mathematically model the blocker tag attack problem using information extracted from the interrogations performed by the reader. Using this analytical framework, we propose a probabilistic blocker tag detection (PBTD) algorithm to detect the presence of an attacker in the system. The probability of false alarm for the P-BTD algorithm is determined via simulation. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm has a better performance than the threshold-based detection algorithm in terms of using a shorter time (i.e., fewer interrogations) to detect the presence of blocker tags.