Evaluation of Practical Attacks Against RFID Technology
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Degree project Evaluation of Practical Attacks Against RFID Technology Author: Hamid Kashfi Supervisor: Ola Flygt Date: 2014-10-21 Course Code: 2DV00E, 15 credits Level: Bachelor Department of Computer Science ii Abstract Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology that has been around for three decades now. It is being used in various scenarios in technologically modern societies around the world and becoming a crucial part of our daily life. But we often forget how the inner technology is designed to work, or even if it is as trustable and secure as we think. While the RFID technology and protocols involved with it has been designed with an acceptable level of security in mind, not all implementations and use cases are as secure as consumers believe. A majority of implementations and products that are deployed suffer from known and critical security issues. This thesis work starts with an introduction to RFID standards and how the technology works. Followed by that a taxonomy of known attacks and threats affecting RFID is presented, which avoids going through too much of technical details but provides references for farther research and study for every part and attack. Then RFID security threats are reviewed from risk management point of view, linking introduced attacks to the security principle they affect. We also review (lack thereof) security standards and guidelines that can help mitigating introduced threats. Finally to demonstrate how practical and serious these threats are, three real-world case studies are presented, in which we break security of widely used RFID implementations. At the end we also review and highlight domains in RFID security that can be researched farther, and what materials we are currently missing, that can be used to raise awareness and increase security of RFID technology for consumers. The goal of this thesis report is to familiarize readers with all of the publicly documented and known security issues of RFID technology, so that they can get a sense about the security state of their systems. Without getting involved with too much technical details about every attack vector, or going throw tens of different books and papers, readers can use this report as a comprehensive reference to educate themselves about all known attacks against RFID, published to the date of writing this report. Keywords: RFID, Security, RFID Attacks, RFID Security, Security Evaluation iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor Ola Flygt for his extensive support through the thesis in form of providing hints and advices, or obtaining required tools and hardware. I would also like to thank my family who has always been my greatest support and motivation and believing in me. I should thank from all of those people whose books, articles, whitepapers, presentations and blogs I have read during these years, which helped me gain their knowledge and experiences at no cost. And my sincere appreciation as always, goes to Ms.Namvar and my uncle Samsum who took my hands during my very first steps of the endless journey of learning about computer science. iv Table of content ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................................................... I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................................... IV 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 BACKGROUND .................................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 PROBLEM DESCRIPTION ................................................................................................................. 2 1.3 RESEARCH METHOD ....................................................................................................................... 2 1.4 REPORT STRUCTURE AND EXPLANATIONS ................................................................................. 3 1.5 ETHICS AND SOCIAL IMPACTS ....................................................................................................... 3 2 RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION (RFID) BACKGROUND ................................ 5 2.1 RFID CONCEPT OF FUNCTIONALITY ............................................................................................ 5 2.2 OPERATION FREQUENCIES ............................................................................................................ 6 2.2.1 Close-coupling Systems: .............................................................................................................. 6 2.2.2 Remote-Coupling Systems: ........................................................................................................ 6 2.2.3 Long-Range Systems: ................................................................................................................... 6 2.3 MODULATION AND (BASEBAND) CODING .................................................................................... 7 2.4 RFID TAG/CARD CLASSES, TYPES AND FORM FACTORS ............................................................ 9 2.4.1 Passive ............................................................................................................................................. 10 2.4.2 Active ................................................................................................................................................ 10 2.4.3 Semi-Active .................................................................................................................................... 10 Simple, Cryptographic and Contactless Smartcard Tags ........................................................ 11 2.4.4 Memory Size and Types ........................................................................................................... 12 2.5 RFID ISO STANDARDS ................................................................................................................. 13 2.5.1 Common Tags Standards ........................................................................................................ 14 2.5.2 Contactless Smart Cards ......................................................................................................... 14 2.5.3 ISO/IEC 10536 ............................................................................................................................. 15 2.5.4 ISO/IEC 14443 ............................................................................................................................. 15 2.5.5 ISO/IEC 15693 ............................................................................................................................. 16 2.5.6 ISO/IEC 14223 ............................................................................................................................. 17 2.5.7 ISO/IEC 69873 ............................................................................................................................. 17 2.5.8 ISO/IEC 10374 ............................................................................................................................. 17 2.5.9 VDI 4470 ......................................................................................................................................... 17 2.5.10 ISO/IEC 18000 Series .......................................................................................................... 18 2.6 RFID VERSUS NFC ........................................................................................................................ 18 3 TAXONOMY OF ATTACKS AND SECURITY ISSUES .....................................................21 3.1 ATTACKERS CLASSIFICATIONS .................................................................................................... 21 3.1.1 Class I (Individual Attackers): ....................................................................................................................... 21 3.1.2 Class II (Professional Attackers/Researchers): .................................................................................... 22 3.1.3 Class III (Funded Organizations): ................................................................................................................ 22 3.2 RADIO FREQUENCY MANIPULATION .......................................................................................... 22 3.2.1 Sniffing............................................................................................................................................. 22 Passive Sniffing: ....................................................................................................................................................................... 23 Active Sniffing: ......................................................................................................................................................................... 23 3.2.2 Replay/Spoofing ......................................................................................................................... 24 3.2.3 Man-in-The-Middle .................................................................................................................... 25 3.2.4 Denial of Service (DoS) ............................................................................................................ 26 Jamming: ....................................................................................................................................................................................