Analysis of Vulnerabilities in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Systems

The purpose of writing this paper is to analyze the types of vulnerabilities that can be found in radio frequency identification (RFID) systems and to check how easy or difficult it is to compromise the security of RFID tags. This paper presents two major attacks, a denial of service attack (dos attack) in which the RFID reader denies to identify a card. The second most effective attack is cloning the RFID card and get the access. These attacks can be carried out using some basic hardware that includes a microcontroller and an RFID reader/writer. Although the companies that make RFID tags have started making many secure cards that are immune to any third party readers but still there exist some types of cards that can be easily read by these readers since these cards are very cost effective hence they are widely used and their security vulnerabilities should be analyzed properly so that these attacks can be prevented.