New ultra high frequency RFID tags are vulnerable to
denial-of-service attacks, academics in Australia have
warned.
Researchers at Edith Cowan University, Perth, said the
vulnerabilities found in UHF RFID tags “are of concern for anyone
trying to implement a RFID system that would have mission critical
or human life issues involved”.
The university’s SCISSEC research group found, documented and
tested a range of attacks on first-generation UHF RFID tags. “Our
team has successfully demonstrated a denial-of-service attack in
the laboratory against Gen1 tags and readers,” the researchers
reported. Attacks could be carried out from a metre away.
The researchers added that the Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum
(FHSS) used for reading tags in many countries did not provide
immunity to DoS attacks, as is often assumed.
“Whilst it is true that a frequency hopping reader unit may
avoid a noisy channel by hopping to the next, an RFID tag is not
able to do this. The tag effectively regards the entire band as a
single channel. Hence it will attempt to read any identifiable
signal which occurs within any channel, anywhere within the entire
band,” the researchers said.
This sort of interference on a single channel would cause the
RFID tag or the reader to enter a communication-fault state.