A Context-Aware Approach for Enhanced Security and Privacy in RFID Electronic Toll Collection Systems

RFID Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems have been deployed worldwide to improve toll collection efficiency, reduce road congestion, increase road safety and traveler satisfiability. However, the use of such systems raises a number of security and privacy issues due to unauthorized reading and relay attacks. Unfortunately, currently deployed or proposed solutions targeting these attacks often fail to satisfy the constraints and requirements of the underlying RFID toll road application in terms of (one or more of) efficiency, security, and usability. In this paper, we report our initial work toward a new approach, one that utilizes sensing technologies, to tackle the problems of unauthorized reading and relay attacks in RFID ETC systems by considering efficiency, security, and usability simultaneously. In our approach, on-board tag sensors are used to collect contextual information (location, speed) about the tag. Such contextual information is then used to design context-aware selective unlocking mechanisms for toll cards such that they can selectively respond to reader interrogations and thus minimize the likelihood of unauthorized reading and relay attacks. The premise of our work is a current technological advancement that enables many RFID tags with sensing capabilities.