An ontology-based intrusion detection for RFID systems

In the last decade, RFID systems have gained increasing popularity, but they also pose many critical security concerns. The most challenging security threat in several RFID applications is tag cloning. In this paper, we do not focus on preventing tag cloning, but propose the application of the intrusion detection model to identify when tag cloning has occurred. In particular, we present an ontology-based misuse detection system (IDS) that integrates information coming from RFID middleware layer to detect tag cloning. Ontologies and rules are applied to formalize the declarative and procedural knowledge required to implement a "track & trace" technique, with the final aim of modelling two levels of detection against tag cloning. An inference engine is used to provide the proposed IDS with the advanced capacity of automatically reasoning about ontologies and rules in order to actually apply the formalized model of detection and infer when a tagged object is cloned or victim of a cloning attack. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.