Comparing cyber physical systems with RFID applications: common attacks and countermeasure challenges

Abstract

The RFID technology is widely used in industrial control systems (ICS) and cyber physical systems (CPS). However, the design of the current RFID protocol is optimal in performance but with less effort invested into security. As such, RIFD infrastructure could be vulnerable against cyber threats. In this paper, we present a positioning of RFID security attacks with CPS attacks. We identified similarities and differences of both type of threats that can serve as baseline to establish an IoT security framework. Additionally, we discuss RFID security countermeasures that we extracted from the literature then we compare it with existing CPS countermeasures. Three security threats categories were identified namely, physical attacks, interception attacks and blocking attacks. Overall, the research avail that attacks are similar for both CPS and RFID systems apart from social engineering attacks that are specific to CPS. However, addressing those attacks requires additional measures due to RFID specificity.