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7.5 Micron Thick RFID Tag
YesSir writes "The EETimes is reporting that Hitachi has a breakthrough in RFID technology that they are planning to show at this years ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference). The new RFID chip is their newest mu-chip that, measuring in at 7.5 microns, is ten or more times thinner than a sheet of paper and comes complete with 128-bit identifying goodness."
Shouldn't a smaller chip mean that even less radiative power is needed to overload and inactivate the tag? So... good news?
Like any technology this could have its uses (as the above example) and I really think a lot of the concerns are exaggerated (I have a hard time getting my RFID badge to trigger the door locks here, even when it's practically touching the reader). The tinfoil hat crowd and their "the black helicopters will read these as they fly over your house" don't make a lot of sense to me.
To repeat a point that Schneier made recently (can't find the link, sorry), there's three ranges involved here and you're making the common mistake of confusing two or more of them.
There's the expected operating range - that's the distance at which the device is intended to function. In order to keep costs down, and to prevent false triggers (which are regarded as worse than false misses), door opening systems, checkout scanners, and similar devices are designed with an intended operating distance of a few inches. At that range it should always work, when the hardware is not defective.
Then there's the maximum operating range - that's how far you can manage to pick up the signal with the same equipment on a good day, if you wave it about a bit and tilt it to get a better angle and clear any metal objects out of the immediate area, etcetera. That's usually a few feet on the same devices.
Then there's the maximum operating range for a person with special equipment. No longer using that cheap $20 RFID reader in the door sensor or checkout. Now we're using an expensive, high-gain antenna with an expensive amplifier, and a specialised computer device on the back end doing noise compensation and stuff. That's usually on a scale of somewhere between dozens of yards and miles (depending on exactly what variation of RFID you are dealing with), reading the same tags that we were reading the first times. The cost of this equipment is measured in hundreds or thousands of dollars. Too much to be installed in a door sensor, but there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't own one if you wanted to, and scan all the RFID tags on your street. Anybody who can afford a helicopter can certainly have one of those.
You are observing some combination of the first two distances and wondering why people are worried about the third one. Saying that the government wants to do this might be a conspiracy theory, but saying that it can be done is not - hobbyists do this kind of thing all the time. Bluetooth has the same issue (normal operating range is a few feet, maximum is some number of miles). Most wireless devices do, to some extent.
The difference between these ranges is just economics at work. You can buy better equipment if you want, but the companies who install hundreds of fixed devices buy the cheapest equipment they can get away with using.
Yes, of course, its not surprising that the RFID chip itself can be incredibly small. What most commentators are missing is that YOU STILL NEED AN ANTENNA to access the thing.
A "long-range" (> few inches) RFID tag needs a relatively large area antenna, like the size of a business card.
A "near-field" tag can have an antenna that is a few millimeters wide, but then your reader has to be very close-- almost touching.
Phooey.
And just how and where does this "linking" happen? Do you think the cash register is going to have an embedded EPC Class 1 Generation 2 RFID tag writer which will for convenience's sake rewrite the tag to include a credit card number? Or would Wal-Mart decide it makes good business sense to host petrabytes of pretty useless data linking credit cards and EPCglobal RFID tag values?
All of these scenarios have a box in the middle of their systems architecture that reads "A miracle occurrs here" where data integration supposedly happens. Until someone figures out a way to perform such miracles, this dog won't hunt.