RFID Security: Attacking the Backend

This chapter focuses on the basic elements of the backend, the vulnerabilities associated with it, and how to make the backend robust and secure. The true benefits of RFID technology can be reaped if RFID events give real-time visibility to the business processes either already in place or to new ones. The backend systems give a business context to the RFID events collected from the RFID data collection tools and then invoke the right business process in real time (or near real time). Protecting the backend system is vital from the various security threats at the network level (attacking ONS or network communication between data collection tool and backend system) or at the data level (spurious events). Using secured communications between various processes can prevent the network level attacks. The data attacks are hard to deal with and application designers must take special care to differentiate spurious events from good events and then act on the good ones almost in real time.