RFID Explained

SecurityFocus has a nice column summarizing the last year's worth of stories about RFID. Of course, you, diligent Slashdot reader, have read about many of these already. But for your slacker friends that need an RFID education in one easy-to-digest article, here you go.

Comments

Interesting technology

[Meat Blaster]

I guess I don't see why we aren't using it already. This could drop inventory costs to a quarter of what they were before -- no more all-nighters trying to discover what's in stock and what isn't.

Isn't Wal-Mart adopting it?

Re:Interesting technology

[b29651]

Personally i have found that companies hire others to snoop in other stores to see what advantage a competitor has so yes i can picture them standing outside a competitors store analyzing the shoppers bags as they exit.My answer and response to this is to encourage all of my older friends to stand in line and insist on the removal of the tags before leaving the store cause older people seem to appreciate privacy and technology isnt as important to them.Can you imagine the employees having to explain these aren't bad to 80 year old ladies that think a robber can see what they have bought and is going to try to steal from them.

Mark of the beast?

[cleancut]

Yes...this always comes up anytime some story regarding chips underneath skin. But it doesn't sound too difficult to slip a RFID tag underneath a hand or forehead.

Sounds an awful lot like this.

Re:Concerns

[Grax]

If you microwave your money and blow out the rfid tags will it still be legal tender?

Security paranoid?

[noitalever]

ok, so in the first part of this article the guy says

"When a transponder receives a certain radio query, it responds by transmitting its unique ID code, perhaps a 128-bit number, back to the transceiver. Most RFID tags don't have batteries (How could they? They're 1/3 of a millimeter!). Instead, they are powered by the radio signal that wakes them up and requests an answer."

Later he throws in this little paranoia bit about "Do you really want your car's tires broadcasting your every move?" What's that about? He knows they don't "broadcast" and that you'd have to be within several feet to monitor. You already have a frickin license plate on your car, so who cares? The good side of that is that you could prove that your tires were now living on someone else's car when they were stolen...

And in that line of thinking, how long will it take for commercial "scanners" to come around, so you can locate the chip and neutralize it? It just seems that people are freaking out about security when in reality, people can already track everywhere you go anyway. How many people out there use cash exclusively? No one I know. I can't WAIT for the day when I just walk out the door with a cart full of stuff and it's automatically taken out of my checking account. that would well be worth someone being able to count how many hammers I buy in a month.

Re:Security paranoid?

[Scrameustache]

Later he throws in this little paranoia bit about "Do you really want your car's tires broadcasting your every move?" What's that about? He knows they don't "broadcast" and that you'd have to be within several feet to monitor. You already have a frickin license plate on your car, so who cares?

Trancievers in every street light...
London would be the first city to implement it.

how long will it take for commercial "scanners" to come around, so you can locate the chip and neutralize it?

How long will it take for DMCA-like laws that make that practice illegal?

I can't WAIT for the day when I just walk out the door with a cart full of stuff and it's automatically taken out of my checking account. that would well be worth someone being able to count how many hammers I buy in a month.

Yes, and I can't wait for organised crime to automatically skim a lil' bit off the top of all our checking accounts as we walk past 'em.
Not much, just a few bucks per person, walk around in a crowd and you'd make a few thousand dollars in minutes...

Re:RFID explained

[realdpk]

You missed something. They are not exactly like bar code tags. Here you go:

They are like bar code tags, except that they are scanned by electromagnetic sensors through your clothing/belongings possibly without you knowing, and carry enough bit-depth to uniquely identify your specific item (serial number), rather than visible lasers at checkout counters, which can only identify the type of item it is, not exactly which specific item it is.

As you can see, it's a bit more complicated than you would have us believe.

Privacy

[msheppard]

From the article:

your privacy is at stake.

Am I the only one sick of "privacy" being used as an argument? It reminds me of "won't someone think of the children." The Constitution/Declaration of Independance do not stipulate privacy.

I'm beginning to think that privacy is costing us too much. If we had access to a plethora of medical information, perhaps we could do some data mining and identify some patterns that would benifit us more than we can imagine.

I'm trying to remember WHY I want all this privacy, why it's so impoartant my purchases be private, who is it I'm afraid of them knowing that I bought a copy of "swank" magazine. I guess if I was a politcian I wouldn't want people to know some things, but I'm just a pretty average citizen, I don't need someone else protecting my privacy.

Maybe an employer would do a backround check and find something - but if they won't hire me becuase of some obscure piece of information, maybe I don't want to work there. Perhaps I'm the kind of person who doesn't really have something like that to hide... it seems the only people concerned about privacy are trying to hide something. Now I'm beginning to ramble...

M@

Re:Privacy

[darthtuttle]

What happens when someone gets a list of everyone who's had an abortion and posts it somewhere so that others can go and shoot them all, or (this is less of an issue now, but would have been) a list of people taking AZT, so the gay bashers can go beat them up.

The ability to access and share information to help the world would be great, it if wasn't for selfish people who will use that information to their own advantage and the disadvantage of the people who the information is about.

Or how about the government monitoring everyone who reads 'Leaving the 21st Century' (not the book about music), 'The Anarchists Cookbook', '2600' or any number of other books.

Here's the thing about privacy, it's yours to give up. You are or will be a responsible adult who can make desicions about how your personal information is distributed and used. You can publish all the facts if you like.

You do need someone to protect your privacy, because you can't get it back once the cat is out of the bag, therefore you need to make the responsible choice about it's use. You can't do that if it's not protected, the desicion is made for you.

What happens when someone who takes Catherine McKinnon's thinking a little to far and decides to shoot people who look at porn (I don't think Catherine would ever do or suguest that).

We all have things to hide. Sure, we would all like to work somewhere were we are wanted for what we can do and not who we are, but the reality of the situation is some of us need to have jobs and we can't pick and choose. In Florida your employer could fire you for the fact that you look at porn in the privacy of your own home. Some companies have fired everyone in the company who was gay or lesbian. Even with protected status clauses often times you get fired for one reason, but they wanted you gone for another. Privacy protects that.

People say your information wants to be free, but I'm still waiting for them to free their credit card numbers and enough bank details to give me access to them.

Re:Privacy

[pmz]

If we had access to a plethora of medical information, perhaps we could do some data mining and identify some patterns that would benifit us more than we can imagine.

Access to aggregate information can accomplish nearly the same thing without identifying individual people in the process.

I'm trying to remember WHY I want all this privacy...

Okay, citing recent news, what if you were an "evil" sodomizer in Texas, who happened to get "evil sodomizer" stamped on his permanent criminal record, potentially harming him for life in the midst of a bigoted and unfair society?

Everyone has different reasons for desiring privacy. Most of those reasons are very subjective in light of religion, culture, and politics. Is there any logical reason why sodomy should be illegal? Absolutely not. What about if you are a Southern Baptist? Or a member of the KKK? What if a person with access to a national database finds you immoral, based on their own bias, and injects incriminating data into your profile? What if you are among the millions of people whose lifestyle doesn't match assumptions built into an arbitrary database schema?

Databases, by themselves, are benign. Databases in the context of human administration and consumption are terribly dangerous.

I guess if I was a politcian I wouldn't want people to know some things, but I'm just a pretty average citizen, I don't need someone else protecting my privacy.

This really answers your own question. There should be no barriers for average citizens to become politicians, if they choose. Representation by the people for the people, or something like that. Simply, privacy is necessary for democracy.

Jamming?

[Pendersempai]

I'm no expert on RFID tags, but it seems that the signal they emit must be fairly faint if it is only a modified echo of the transmitted query. For passive tags, this means their emission can be no stronger (and in reality must be far weaker) than the strength of the query signal when it reached the tag. Transmitted through three dimensions, my college physics course tells me that these signals drop off proportionally to the inverse square of their distance -- and for RFID, whose query signal must be bounced back without additional power, the distance would have to be double that from interrogator to tag. And then we'd have to factor in the unavoidable inefficiency in the tag itself.

So the signal is going to be faint. Why can't we carry around a jammer? It wouldn't have to be very complicated to function quite elegantly -- it could passively monitor RFID query broadcasts and automatically reply with misleading noise. Since it can measure the signal strength of the query, it could use its own power source to magnify its response by, say, 20%. It seems that should be enough to drown the response from any tag in one's clothing, driver's license, or other effects. A switch could allow the user to disable it when he wants RFID signals to get through -- to have the cashier ring up his purchase, for example.

I can't imagine that the power requirement for extended usage would be that steep -- active (powered) RFID tags theoretically function for 10 years or longer. The circuitry, too, seems like it would be fairly trivial. I'd guess that they wouldn't be significantly more costly to produce than regular AA battery cases. Maybe they could even function for years on the juice of a button battery, and fit the form factor of a credit card.

So why doesn't CASPIAN or anyone else against RFID privacy violations mass-produce these things and sell them online for a couple bucks? I'd grab one just for the coolness factor, and I'm sure lots of privacy advocates would use them too. It'd certainly protect the privacy of anyone using one, and by making the collected data less reliable, even those without would indirectly benefit.

It wouldn't interfere with non-retail uses of RFID tags, since there is a specific spectrum range reserved for retail use -- something like 1.25-8.64mHz. And by introducing a degree of randomness into marketers' data, general trends (governed by the Central Limit Theorem) could still be deduced, whereas individual data points would be significantly less reliable. Hence, the data would be quite useful for tailoring goods to what most people want (a good thing) without allowing individual-level violation of privacy.