Addressing Covert Channel Attacks in RFID-Enabled Supply Chains

RFID technology can help competitive organizations optimize their supply chains. However, it may also enable adversaries to exploit covert channels to surreptitiously spy on their competitors. We explain how tracking tags and compromising readers can create covert channels in supply chains and cause detrimental economic effects. To mitigate such attacks, the authors propose a framework that enables an organization to monitor its supply chain. The supply chain is modeled as a network flow graph, where tag flow is verified at selected key nodes, and covert channels are actively sought. While optimal taint checkpoint node selection is algorithmically intractable, the authors propose node selection and flow verification heuristics with various tradeoffs. The chapter discusses economically viable countermeasures against supply chain-based covert channels, and suggests future research directions.

Building Scalable, Private RFID Systems

Due to low cost and easy deployment, RFID has become a promising technology in many applications, such as retailing, medical-patient management, logistics, and supply chain management. Although a number of RFID standards have been issued and widely adopted by many off-the-shelf products, those standards, however, scarcely added privacy concerns because of computing and communication patterns. On the other hand, in RFID systems, RF tags emit their unique serial numbers to RF readers. Without privacy protection, however, any reader can identify a tag ID via the emitted serial number. Indeed, a malicious reader can easily perform bogus authentications with detected tags to retrieve sensitive information within its scanning range. The main obstacle to preserving privacy in RFID systems lies in the capability of tags. Due to the cost consideration, common RFID tags have tight constraints on power, computational capacity, and memory. Therefore, the mature cryptographic tools for bulky PCs are not suitable for RFID devices. In this chapter, the author focuses on the privacy issue to establish scalable and private RFID systems. The chapter first discusses the privacy issue in RFID systems; and then correspondingly introduces privacy preserving techniques including privacy-preserving authentication and secure ownership transfer. Finally, the theoretic formal privacy models for RFID systems are given, in which the author formally defines privacy and the behaviors of adversaries in RFID systems. Based on a formal model, say the weak privacy model, the chapter illustrates the methodology for designing highly efficient privacy-preserving authentication protocols.

Security Terminology

The widespread use of RFID technology gives rise to security concerns. Cryptographic technology provides various valuable tools to enhance the security of RFID systems. In the literature, many cryptographic protocols have been proposed and designed for safeguarding RFID systems. In this chapter, the author describes some fundamental terminologies in information security and cryptology. More information on cryptography can be found in (Mao, 2003; Koblitz, 1994; Stinson, 2005; Stallings, 2006).

Malware Protection on RFID-Enabled Supply Chain Management Systems in the EPCglobal Network

As RFID-enabled technology is becoming pervasive in enterprise systems and human life, it triggers significant concerns over the malware that can infect, damage, and even destroy RFID-enabled network systems. RFID malware can spread malicious codes or data quickly to a large number of RFID systems via RFID read and write, which are pervasive operations on RFID tags that are transported from one RFID system to another. To address this concern, this chapter uses RFID-enabled supply chain management systems in the EPCglobal network as a case study to demonstrate the important issues in RFID malware protection. This case study shows that although there are fundamental difficulties in preventing RFID malware from entering the systems, the behaviors of RFID malware resemble traditional malware after it enters the systems. Based on this characteristic, the security threats of RFID malware can be effectively controlled.

Identification and Authentication for RFID Systems

In this chapter, the author briefly reviews the various attacks on existing identification and authentication schemes and describes the challenges in their design for RFID systems. The chapter categorizes the RFID identification and authentication schemes into two general categories: cryptographic and non-cryptographic solutions. Cryptographic solutions are based on symmetric or asymmetric cryptography systems. Depending on the resources available on the RFID tags, algorithms based on standard cryptography cannot be utilized in an RFID system and new cryptographic algorithms must be designed. However, there remain security challenges in protecting the RFID systems that cannot be solved solely by relying on cryptographic solutions. The chapter also reviews these challenges and looks at the countermeasures based on non-cryptographic solutions that would further protect RFID systems.

Computer System Attacks

The study of computer system attacks is an important part RFID security and privacy. This chapter provides a general overview of computer system attacks organized by target. Attacks on EPC entities - tags, readers, middleware, and back-end systems - are categorized and discussed, as well as wired link attacks. Countermeasures to the attacks are summarized and evaluated based on the discussion. The Denial of Services (DoS) attack is highlighted in the discussion.

Privacy Issues in RFID

The chapter first investigates privacy issues in RFID systems, namely information privacy threats and location privacy threats. RFID systems should be able to resist tag information leakage and tag tracking attacks. Next, the author presents a few formal models in which the notion of privacy in RFID systems is defined. To measure the privacy level of various RFID protocols, a formal privacy definition is needed. Formal models for RFID systems are continually being developed. Here, the chapter describes definitions of RFID systems, adversaries, experiments, and privacy in the most popular models so far: the Avoine model, the Juels-Weis model, and the Vaudenay model.

Hardware Attacks

In a secure system, the algorithms, protocols, and digital data are finally implemented and stored on hardware, such as chips, DSP, and registers. Knowledge of the implementation may be used to carry out attacks against the system without attacking the algorithms and protocols directly. The hardware which implements the system deserves much attention and scrutiny. Several hardware attacks are shown in this chapter, which is helpful in designing a secure RFID system.

RFID Standards

There are many RFID standards defined by different standardization bodies and organizations. These evolving standards are often overlapping may be confusing to the practitioners. In this chapter, a summary of the RFID technology is given with the relevant standardization bodies and their RFID standards.

An Overview of Cryptography

As Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices become ever more ubiquitous it is very likely that demands on them to provide certain types of security such as authentication, confidentiality, and privacy and encryption for security, depending on the application, will increase. This chapter gives a brief overview of cryptographic techniques and protocols. Given the often limited complexity and power of RFID devices, much effort has been devoted to devising so-called “lightweight” cryptographic techniques for such devices, and a few of these are considered in this chapter. Even public key techniques to provide services such as identification and digital signatures have been proposed for some scenarios involving RFID devices, although such devices will obviously require significant computing power. While such applications are seemingly beyond currently available technology, given the speed at which technology is able to yield computational increases at reasonable cost and device size, it seems prudent to consider such protocols at this point.