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RFID Personal Firewall

Posted by samzenpus on from the just-for-you dept.

JanMark writes "Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum and his student Melanie Rieback (who published the RFID virus paper in March) and 3 coauthors have now published a paper on a personal RFID firewall called the RFID Guardian. This device protects its owner from hostile RFID tags and scans in his or her vicinity, while letting friendly ones through. Their work has won the Best Paper award at the USENIX LISA Conference."

4 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by Steppman2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I guess whit officially makes them white-hats, however, I'd still be worried about the ability to spoof a legitimate rfid or steal one and deactivate this firewall. Things that are considered by many to be foolproof make things that much worse when they fall through...

  2. Attack Barriers by blueZhift · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This reminds me of the anime Ghost in the Shell wherein people use sophisticated attack barriers to defend their cyberbrains from unwanted intrusions. It seems that we are approaching the need for personal firewalls much faster than anticipated driven by the desire of world governments to more closely monitor their citizens as well as consumer desire for more personal electronics. I'd say we probably have only a year or two before implantable cell phones/accessories start making an appearance. Soon thereafter the first viruses targeting those systems will show up. So the personal firewall business should be pretty good.

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  3. Re:Old News by ParaphiliaNOS · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My assumption is either the staff are hardware people or have just prefer the security of static HTML.

    Staff: www.rfidguardian.org/people.html

  4. Re:Faraday Cage by Cruise_WD · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Makes sense, since that's a common strategy for dealing with spam: Block anything except emails from a known source.
    That comment just triggered an odd thought in my head... ...in the future, will we look back at spam gratefully, for all the practice it's given us in blocking unwanted intrusions into our systems in a (realtively) benign way? Or does it just demonstrate how easily the majority of people will ignore privacy and real security and make life hell for the rest of us?

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