Malaysia to Use RFID Number Plates Next Year

durianwool wrote in with a story about Malaysia's plans to introduce RFID number plates. It reads: "'The first thing thieves do after a car theft is change the registration plates,' Road Transport Department Director-General Ahmad Mustapha was quoted as saying. The microchips, using radio frequency identification technology, will be fixed into the number plates and can transmit data at a range of up to 100 meters (yards), the report said. They will have a battery life of 10 years, it said. "

Comments

Now the second thing..

[Yetihehe]

will be to fry, change or overwrite RFID tag

Re:Now the second thing..

[arivanov]

And how exactly are you going to cross a road toll or a police checkpoint?

This is one of the few possible use of RFID which make sense. Your number plate is out in plain sight anyway, it is also visible at the same or greater distance as the reader range. So there is no privacy implication here. In fact many privately run road toll systems already use this tech and this is simply an extension to cover the entire country.

Compared to the alternatives like Ken Livingston's London CCTV camera recognition and the UK dept of tranport "GPS in every car" scheme this is considerably less privacy invasive and much much cheaper. In fact - I would prefer this to them any day (especially to the GPS in every car idea).

Re:Now the second thing..

[garcia]

Ah, because they don't need human interaction in order to check for you passing between the gates. If someone is sitting at a computer monitor with a stopwatch mechanism and times you between the gates and calculates that you are speeding, I have no problems with the "technology" (as it's just like VASCAR over a longer distance).

What I do have a problem with is automated systems to do this job (i.e. lowjacking cars) so that it's fast and easy to make revenue.

Re:Now the second thing..

[Sancho]

In a situation like this, you'd eventually see a complete turnover of traffic laws. Traffic analysts have shown that without speeders, congestion is unbelievable (or more accurately, if everyone is going the same speed, the congestion is terrible). Because so many people are willing to go the speed limit, and a few people drive below and above it, traffic flow is reasonable. Speeders only speed because there is a low chance of being caught.

With automatic tracking/ticketing of speeders, beyond the obvious problem of loaning your car to someone, you'll see the roads getting clogged constantly. Something will have to be done to alleviate the problem, and that something will either be having personal speed limits (you can drive faster if you pass a safety test), greater public transportation to reduce the cars on the road (I'm all for this--there's virtually none in my state), bigger roads (ug), or a reversal to manually tracked speeding.

Re:Now the second thing..

[4815162342]

Actually I have to agree with this. Normally I am opposed to the increasing use of technology in ways which reduce our privacy.
However in this case I think the benefits actually outweigh the costs.

I do see potential for abuse but I also see how this technology can be used to make car theft (and particularly resale) much more difficult.

The way I see it, it could work like this:

Licensing authority when issuing plates encodes the following information on the integrated chip:
"KV4782-Blue Honda Civic Saloon-VIN 1M8GDM9A_KP042788"
The proposed information being : License number-Description-Vehicle Identification Number

The trick being that, along with the plain-text, is stored a private key signed signature of the encoded data, using one of the recognised encryption/signing algorithms such as RSA.
Furthermore the private key used is only stored on the government issuing equipment and never on the chip itself. Thus no amount of tampering can reveal the key.

Granted there is still the requirement to ensure the security of the issuing machines. However this is can be solved with good old fashioned physical security, multiple keys, revocation lists etc.

The government then publishes the corresponding public keys allowing law enforcement agencies and other interested parties to validate license plates.
e.g. Officer stops the car, pulls out hand-held device compares the license plate and vehicle description. If he has any reason to be suspicious, he can also ask to inspect the VIN.

The other benefit of this system is that companies can start to offer hand held scanners which perform the same function.
Thus if I am buying a new car I can pull out my cheap $10 scanner and perform a verification that the car plate matches the VIN.
If the government then publish a list of stolen plates I can have a reasonable degree of confidence that the car I am buying isn't stolen.

I reckon that if such a system was in widespread use the lives of the car thieves would get considerably more difficult.
It will be very interesting to see how this system works out in Malaysia but if its done right I think it could be a powerful tool against crime.

Re:Now the second thing..

[p43751]

You would believe a road can handle more cars the faster they go. If you really looked at the facts you would find that with quite simple math you can draw a line-chart showing cars/hour and you would see that you are correct all the way up to around 17 km/h after that you actually get less cars/hour. The reason is quite simple, the space each car use increase as the speed go up so that every car will have enough space to stop(remember 1 sec. 2 sec.. 3..)

So max cars pr hour on a straight road all using a reasonable distance to the car in front is actually around 17 km/h. We did the math in highschool to mix math and physics. (we also calculated how much current will pass through you if you get run over by an electric train, how far would a bicyclist bounce if hitt by a truck etc..... fun times)

Re:Now the second thing..

[sgtrock]

That's still a manageable risk, though, with proper training, laws, enforcement, and to a lesser extent better road design. Have you ever driven on the autobahn? Cars zipping along at up to 140+ mph in the inside lane, 70-100 mph in the middle lane or two, while the outside lane lumbers along at 50-60 mph. Accidents are rare, although admittedly when they involve the inner two lanes things can get kinda messy.

The Germans do it by having a longer driving course than the US does, their traffic laws and penalties are designed to enforce common courtesy between drivers, and their traffic cops are very aggressive about enforcing their laws. The autobahns were designed to fit the countryside as opposed to blowing straight lines through it (reduces driver fatigue by giving them a road that requires that they actually look at it instead of get hypnotized), and they have road beds that are designed to last much longer than the US's. Frankly, I think that if people here could see how well the German system works, most of them would vote to adopt the first three practices immediately if it meant that we could actually have sane traffic flows at much higher speeds.

Not groundbreaking

[Raindance]

This is not as groundbreaking as it would seem. I believe all new automobile tires in the U.S. come with unique, tamper-proof RFID chips in them already.

Re:Not groundbreaking

[Tmack]

parent surely meant "Machiavellian"

Michelivellian?

bad puns aside: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/269 /1/1/

tm

Re:Not groundbreaking

[thestuckmud]

I believe all new automobile tires in the U.S. come with unique, tamper-proof RFID chips in them already.

No. Not yet, anyway. There is a standard for auto tire RFIDs, that meets both automobile industry and retail requirements, but RFID industry sources say it will be years before these are widely deployed. Michelin is testing them. Goodyear has them to track leased race tires. Your car does not.

Even so, it may be time to start thinking of ways to extend that tin foil hat.

Re:Huh?

[Colgate2003]

There are both passive (no battery) and active (battery-assisted) tags. Want an example of an active RFID? Try EZ-Pass.

I don't get it.

[shmlco]

I don't get it. The first thing they do is change the plates... so we're going to put tags into the plates???

No such thing as tamper-proof

[davidwr]

There is tamper-evident, and tamper-self-destructing.

Unless the car depends on the chip to work, it should be easy to disable the chip using microwaves or some such. The hard part is destroying it without causing visible damage to the tire.

Re:I don't get it.

[FlyByPC]

Um, and have the government know exactly where every car is, where they've been, and how long they've been there?

What a doubleplusgood idea for MiniLuv, citizen...

I for one do NOT welcome any such RFID overlords.

i guess

[sleepsleep]

i guess it would works like this eg. when the thief steals a car, they would change the plate, (if that plate is without RFID tag) the police would probably double check the car and its owner, if the replaced plate got its own RFID tag, the police would check the car description based on that RFID tag, if it is correct, then they can pass the block, otherwise, the police would invite them to police station.

btw, the police could just drive along the road and just check everybody RFID tag and their car description without asking them to stop ;) and if the tag doesn't match the car, then they can ask the driver to stop :) i guess something like that ;)

Re:I don't get it.

[garcia]

The first thing the government does is tell its people that its spying protects them from harm.

Re:Speed of the car ?

[LiquidCoooled]

I hate not being able to use my mobile phone in the car or listen to the broadcast radio whilst moving.

Re:Meters (yards) ???

[Ralph Yarro]

INSIGHTFUL?

The range isn't really a round number of standard measuring units. In fact it isn't even constant, depending instead on a whole range of conditions and on the equipment in use. 100 meters and 100 yards are both approximations that are sufficiently inaccurate that it really doesn't matter which you use.

Stupid

[Life700MB]

I work in a RFID related start-up and I can assure you that putting the RFID tags in the plates just doesn't make sense, is just like adding a control number to the plate... what you want to know is if the plates correspond to the car, not a second way of identifying the plates!!!

They should add the tag into the inners of the car, so they can detect when a detected RFID value and the plate don't match. It's a lot more useful, IMHO.

Also I found funny to see the specs of the RFID chips (tags, as we know them) of 100 meters and ten years of battery, are exactly the same as ours... it would be priceless to discover reading Slashdot that our American partners are doing extra hours without telling my boss!!!

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Brazil is on that wagon too

[Marcos Eliziario]

My country is going to introduce RFID plates, starting with cargo trucks, next year. What really pisses me off is that nobody here seems to care about the huge privacy issues related to this.

Re:I don't get it.

[tilandal]

Your plates are registered to a VIN. They scan the plate to get the VIN from the RFID tag. They then look at the VIN on your car and if they don't match you go to jail.