A HYBRID FUZZY/GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR INTRUSION DETECTION IN RFID SYSTEMS

Abstract

Various established and emerging applications of RFID technology have been and are being implemented by companies in different parts of the world. However, RFID technology is susceptible to a variety of security and privacy concerns, as it is prone to attacks such as eavesdropping, denial of service, tag cloning and user tracking. This is mainly because RFID tags, specifically low-cost tags, have low computational capability to support complex cryptographic algorithms. Tag cloning is a key problem to be considered since it leads to severe economic losses. One of the possible approaches to address tag cloning is using an intrusion detection system. Intrusion detection systems in RFID networks, on top of the existing lightweight cryptographic algorithms, provide an additional layer of protection where other security mechanisms may fail. This thesis presents an intrusion detection mechanism that detects anomalies caused by one or more cloned RFID tags in the system. We make use of a Hybrid Fuzzy Genetics-Based Machine Learning algorithm to design an intrusion detection model from RFID system-generated event logs. For the purpose of training and evaluation of our proposed approach, part of the RFID system-generated dataset provided by the University of Tasmania’s School of Computing and Information Systems was used, in addition to simulated datasets. The results of our experiments show that the model can achieve high detection rates and low false positive rates when identifying anomalies caused by one or more cloned tags. In addition, the model yields linguistically interpretable rules that can be used to support decision making during the detection of anomaly caused by the cloned tags.