Facing man-in-the-middle and route diversion attacks in energy-limited RFID systems based on mobile readers

Focus of this paper is a large RFID system, where mobile readers detect the presence of RFID tags in the surrounding and, periodically, report the outcome of such operation to a control center interested in localizing all RFID tags. In order to deliver the above reports to the control center, mobile readers establish a mobile ad hoc network. In this context, a possible objective of an attacker may be to make the system believe that the position of a certain RFID tag is different from the actual one. To achieve this, the attacker performs man-in-the-middle and routing diversion attacks. Solutions can be devised for combating such attacks but they involve increased energy consumption. In this paper the problem is stated and the tradeoff between security and energy efficiency discussed. Furthermore, some preliminary results are shown and analyzed.