Virus Jumps to RFID

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday July 17, 2006 @03:30AM

MrShaggy writes "According to a BBC article, researchers have been able to make the jump between RFID tags and viruses. They found that the mere act of scanning a mere 127 bytes could cause an attack vector that would corrupt databases. From the article;'"This is intended as a wake-up call," said Andrew Tanenbaum, one of the researchers in the computer science department at Amsterdam's Free University that did the work revealing the weaknesses on smart tags. "We ask the RFID industry to design systems that are secure," he said.'"

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Like the JPEG "virus" by kherr · 2006-07-17 03:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

It is the software running on the host machine which does not validate the data coming from the tag that has major issues.

Absolutely. This is just like the Windows JPEG "virus" that was due to buggy JPEG parsing. Describing RFIDs as an attack vector is appropriate, but inert data can not be a virus. You typically don't execute images or identification information. Perhaps there needs to be some catchy name for this type of attack, but really it's just a new example of the common overflow bug.