An Empirical Study for Protecting Passive RFID Systems against Cloning

RFID technology plays a key role in various areas of interest without guaranteeing security and privacy issues. Limitations of tag design make privacy and security enforcement a special challenge. In this paper, we introduce the essential components of an RFID system. Subsequently the RFID tag-to-reader authentication is presented as a solution framework for the tag cloning problem. The proposed solution involves receiving EPC RFID Generation-2 standard response messages, which vary according to power level when sent a tag KILL command. Moreover, an empirical analysis is conducted to determine the necessary power level to kill the RFID tag for different brands and types. The intention of the conducted experiments is to determine the necessary power levels at which various RFID tags were able to be killed when preprogrammed with a specific KILL password. The authors found that results of power levels at which tags killed themselves varied widely.