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Chemical, Printable RFIDs
Syre writes "The RFID Journal says that CrossID, an Israeli startup, has developed an RFID system that can be printed using an inkjet printer. The 'nanometric' RFID system uses tiny particles of chemicals with varying degrees of magnetism that resonate when bombarded with electromagnetic waves from a reader. Since the system uses up to 70 different chemicals, each chemical is assigned its own position in a 70-digit binary number. 'Previously, there has been no way to protect paper documents,' says Moshe Glickstein, CrossID cofounder. 'We have created the first firewall for paper documents.' The big advantage is that the tag can be printed on just about anything. 'It's as easy to create as a printed bar code. And we can print in invisible mode for extra security. Printing the tags cost less than 1 cent each.' Their FAQ
says that 'CrossID can be read from quite a long distance'. No word on whether it can be user-disabled..."
If it is built into the bar code, would the stores that carry said products have to reveal to their customers that RFID tags were in items? Scary.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Think about it... if it's so easy and so cheap to produce RFID's, then what's to prevent us from printing out reams of the stuff, like a stack of paper where each sheet has a thousand RFID's printed on it, and then carrying whatever documents we'd like within that stack of paper.
This also makes it easy to forge RFID's, doesn't it? Why pay full cost at the local market when you can play "The Price is Right" using your printer at home.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
How much is a cartridge for one of these ink jet printers which can make these cheap RFID tags? Probably about $10o each.
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
"No word on whether it can be user-disabled..."
what about by using a strong magnetic field?
I mean seriously, is there some problem this if really fixing, do we need to track paper documents? How many paper documents are just prints of digital documents?
They say it will work well on SKU tags but the article says it has some shortcomings in nasty (industrial environments). Most production factories I have been in were pretty environmentally nasty, so if it cannot stand up to where it would be most used, why have it.
Zebra printers printing bar codes on plastic tags have worked so much better everywhere I have had to put them including some factories that are as close to the depths of hell as I want to get to.
Seems to me this could be easily implemented to be an anti-counterfeit measure.
Hmmmm....so if they install readers in copy machines, how about I just hand copy the document (or just the very important facts, figures, etc.)? How about a little hand scanner? How about an older USB scanner attached to my laptop?
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Do human beings count as water filled objects? Keep them from cheaply tracking US, if we can distort the waves with our bodies.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
If the goal is to steal one sheet of information, take a picture, memorize it, copy it, etc... all valid ways to subvert this system.
That is not very practical in the real world.
Most times one wants to steal a whole bunch at a time.
I am sure we have all read interesting things that
are left sitting in the printer unattended... that might have
value to someone else outside the company doors.
So that seems to be what this system might stop.
One cannot stick 100 pages of information in their
pants, covered by their shirt and just walk out.
At one cent a page, it seems very reasonable to install those
directly into your printer. I want one too. Well as long as it
comes in a normal printer as an added feature. Let the printer
company pay the license fee, and I will buy the special inks.
Profit.
By quoting the co-founder, I may have given the impression that this is just an RFID for paper.
Actually, they say they could print this on all kinds of materials, so it could be sprayed onto products before they are painted, etc.
I kind of doubt you could deactivate them by overloading them, as you can other RFIDs.
This could be a rather invasive and hard to counteract development...
If this thing is so easy and cheap, I wouldn't use it as certification that confidential documents haven't been tampered with. The same scan that could be done to verify the papers were legit would also allow you to get the get the RFID, then just print the same RFID paint on your new documents.
It's just a RF barcode. It lets machines read things a little bit easier. There is nothing very secure about it, especially once it becomes widespread.
The biggest change I forsee is that the cashier at the grociery store - if they still have a job - won't have to touch anything. The conveyor belt will scan all the food as it goes down to the bagger, and probably your RFID Credit Card too.
My greater fear is that they will outlaw individual possession of RFID readers. It's not too much of a stretch for the folks who thought up the DMCA to apply its "anti-circumvention device" prohibition to RFID readers. If we can't read 'em we can't find 'em, and if we can't find 'em we can't remove 'em.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The problem with RFID technology is that while it works well at close range with limited sensors, in a real world environment with noise, reliability goes down significantly. Companies like WalMart are already spending millions on research on RFID technology. We're still not at a stage when sheep or bees are equiped with unique rfid tags. Imagine having the power to ssh into a bee and mess with it's brain! Watch out for the new species of "killer bees"...
ah but if these chemicals are so cheap we can just spray them everywhere effectively jamming the signal
It would appear that all you need to do to fuck this up is to have some extra chemcials on the paper.
They say that they have 70 different chemicals that all resonate at different frequencies, they assign each chemical to a certain position in a 70 bit string.
So if you want to mess with it, all you need to do is add a few drops of glue with (say) 15 of the chemicals in it onto the item, then the reader reads a 70 bit code with 15 extra 1's in it.... which is not the code that it's looking for, move along.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
With RFID built into currency as an anit-counterfeit tool, now they will be able to cross-reference my cash-on-hand with products in the store. As I reach for the overpriced Ben-N-Jerry's a voice will say "you can't afford it bud!"
Wow, if the article is right on and the tech is solid, this is something that will revolutionize the way we live.
With a 3-10ghz range wireless reader, these would be the most feasible types of tags to use as a security device.
When entering a secured facility, you could get a unique card printed up and be allowed or denied access to rooms/areas via installed card readers. I'd much rather have a throw away card over biometrtics any day. And this such much more reliable over all.
And what about home security?
These could act as keyless entry, and also allow you to tag your belongings so that if they were detected as leaving your premesis, the authorities could be contacted.
There are plenty of 1984ish applications such as embedding these into ID cards/Drivers Licenses, which could in the future be a very effective way to monitor peoples comings and goings. But, I'm sure there are hundred of tinfoil cap wearing slashbts who could delve into those areas for me.
for the dedicated, though, such bans never seem to work. police scanners are illegal in my country... but i picked one up at a pawn shop for $100. and every city desker at your local newspaper worth his/her nacl has one.
only a few years ago, military grade crypto was restricted for private use in the state, and that didn't stop anyone who wanted it from getting it.
2 1337 4 u!
The "mark of the beast" IS the answer to many problems facing governments and corporations of our time.
...) you have the necessary infrastructure.
And with the various RFID technologies and entities pusing for
implimentation (Walmart, US military) you have things shaping up pretty
nicely.
With a system where each person has their own id (read mark) imprinted into their wrist or forehead things like identity theft (bogus sellers, bogus buyers - think ebay, think credit card,...), piracy (copyright infringment), tracking of individuals (think terrorists, enemies of the state, rapists, kidnapped persons, etc) would (seemingly) fall by the wayside.
With the many converging technologies of today this is getting easier all the time. With technologies like the internet, and wireless access points (hotels, corporations, restaurants,
Revelation 13: 16-17:
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark..."
I think geeks should unite and play up the "sign of the beast" angle, that way the fundamentalist christian crazies will resist it, and hence the republican party.... :)
But in all seriousness folks, this would probably backfire. The Fundamentalist Christians support the state of Israel precisely because they expect Armageddon to start there, and -- according to their Holy Book -- Armageddon has to happen before Christ returns to reward the Fundies.
That Armageddon is supposed to leave Israel hip deep in blood is one of those regrettably necessary evils. It'll be th blood of the Jews and the Muslims, not the Fundies. The Fundies will rule for 1000 years at the side of Christ, or rise bodily into heaven or however it is their Sky-Ghost is supposed to reward them.
Since another Sign of the "End Times" is the ubiquitous appearance of the Mark of the Best on foreheads or hands everywhere, I wouldn't be surprised to see Fundies being all for it, on the theory that the sooner the Beast comes, the sooner Christ follows.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
no, you are not.
... but in this day and age, I'm wondering if thats actually just a sensible precaution.
Most people have a scar on their left arm from some innoculation that we all get when we're babies. I forget what it's for - measels I think. Anyway - what it's for is unimportant. (I think the X-Files had a wonderful episode where they postulated that the tissue collected from every innoculation went into a big storehouse for a genetic database)
One could very easily see how a government could set it up so that everyone was tagged during this innoculation.
We have it in Australia, and I see the same scars here all the time in Japan and I saw them in England - I wonder how many other countries do this innoculation?
God, I'm turning into a paranoid nut
I believe that this company's technology is a hoax. The description from the RFId Journal page is nonsense. The CrossID homepage is very vague and lacks any useful information (just read the last FAQ item at the bottom of the page.)
The description that the RFId Journal gives reads like pseudoscience. Here's an example:
The system uses "nanometric" materials--tiny particles of chemicals with varying degrees of magnetism--that resonate when bombarded with electromagnetic waves from a reader.
Some elements and molecules will resonate (emit electromagnatic energy [EM]) when exposed to EM radiation of a particular frequency, but only in the presence of a magnetic field! The process the article describes (without mention of the magnetic field) is that used by MRI machines. Why didn't the article or homepage mention the superconducting electromagnets necessary for the RFId tags to operate?
Even if the tag materials are magnetic (in which case its composition must be a ferrous metal, ceramic, or a magnetic plastic), then the very weak magnetic field is still not strong enough to cause the atoms/molecules to resonate in an EM field. Another sentence from article shows more inaccuracies:
CrossID is testing readers that operate at three to 10 GHz, which is higher than the frequencies commonly used by wireless LANs and handheld computers, although the company has not made a final determination on what frequency the readers will use.
They claim that 70 tag compounds are used which all have different resonate frequencies. Fine, the reader would use a wide-band receiver. I read the above as the tag reader using one transmit frequency. The trouble is that it is unlikely that those 70 compounds will all resonate when exposed to the same frequency EM waves. Anyway, it states that a "final determination" hasn't been made for what frequency to use! If the RFId tag ink exists then it MUST already be known what frequency must be used. This tech is bogus.
This article is just like the "Ubiquitous LED" article a few days ago. (if you want the reasons just reply) This article should not have been posted. It is not even wrong ;)
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
I see the only method to create something with characteristic frequencies distributed evenly in microwave band: Piezoelectric quartz nanoparticles that resonate on different frequencies due to different size. Let us estimate the size. Speed of sound in solids is somewhere 1.5 kilometers per second (plus-minus 1 order of magnitude), so 1 GHz resonator crystal is about 1.5 micrometers in size. Such nanoparticles are easily printable, but I still see no way to create them equal.
And the second: I hear the word "magnetic". But I have heard about some magnetic resonances such as used in magneto-resonant tomography - and they all require the specific ambient magnetic field.
Let us wait for more info. For instance, a lot of IDs sticked together will be a good jammer.
So that would seem to incline towards a control of the ink materials or production. I wonder how hard these chemicals would be to produce in a non-industrial setting?
I also wonder if the detectors could be improved to detect relative density -- of course that would just mean you need to do a little tinkering with the "eraser" so that it detects the signature and adjusts the masking mix . . .
Also, of course, having detectors capable of detecting relative density would increase the "namespace", though 2^70 already gives us ~200 million unique identifiers for each of 6 billion humans.