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RFID More Hackable Than Retailers Think?
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Lukas Grunwald, a senior consultant with DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH, is warning retailers that the RFID technology that they are quickly adopting can easily be hacked with the appropriate tools. Grunwald has written a program called RFDump which lets you read and display all metadata within an RFID tag and also modify the user data using a text or hex editor. He wrote this program to demonstrate how consumers can protect themselves by wiping out RFID data after purchasing a product but he acknowledges that it would be trivial to abuse this behavior. What, you might ask, can you do if you hack an RFID tag? Well as the technology is adopted more widely a thief could conceivably mark down the price of an expensive piece of jewelry before paying for it at an automated checkout counter, underage hackers could purchase alcohol or adult movies, and pranksters could simply reprogram the inventory of an entire store by just walking up and down the isles. 'The people who will be using this (shopkeepers) don't know much about technology,' Grunwald warned."
...but I'd love to walk their aisles with something like this in my pocket and do my own price rollbacks!
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well DUH.. the DMCA will prevent all of this! Because if something is illegal, obviously nobody will do it!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
1^64 (or is it 1^64 factorial?)
i hope you're trolling, because both numbers are 1
I for one would be delighted to see smirking hackers walking along the aisles of departement stores, wiping every RFID tag in site. At least that would wipe the smirks off the faces of marketing execs who lust after every intimate detail of our lives.
If they try to kick you out, dump the zapper in some old ladies trolley. She'll march about for hours, wiping any spy gadgets in the buliding. Some might construe this as vandalism, but I construe reading dozens of RFID tags, covertly embedded in every item I buy, an illegal search.
Of course execs will find some law (can you say DMCA) to label any such defenders of privacy evil criminals who seek to undermine the economy and of course the usual line, RFID helps fight terrorism or some such rubbish. They're probobly looking for a way to make RFID blocker tags illegal as well.
Unfortunatly, the solution may be simply to make RFIS tags read only, further compounding the privacy issue.
May the Maths Be with you!
How do RFID fit into this? Well, imagine a clock that vibrates when you are about to touch some ethically questionable item!
So when wouldn't it vibrate?
Imagine if every RFID scanner incorporated a unique RFID which another scanner can scan. Then the scanner's scanner can scan your scanner and avert your scanner scam.
Then their scanner has an RFID chip in it too, so we can use another scanner to scan for the scanners which are scanning for our scanners (which we've cloaked in tinfoil).
It's scanner proliferation, baby.
<grrr>