Hybrid Physical Layer Security for Passive RFID Communication

Abstract

Thanks to its low cost, small weight and energy efficiency, passive radio frequency identification (RFID) backscatter communications systems have attracted a lot of attention in several application fields. However, such devices have limited computational capabilities and resources which makes them unable to incorporate traditional security protocols and are there-fore vulnerable to several types of attacks including cloning and counterfeiting. Therefore, in this paper, a novel hybrid RFID tags identification and malicious devices detection system is proposed by exploiting the estimated tags locations and manufacturing imperfections. In particular, an iterative approach is proposed to estimate the minimum power response at each frequency of the tag in addition to its location. The conducted simulation results show the efficiency of this technique in detecting all the malicious tags and classify the legitimate ones under different network configurations.