RFID Guardian Protects Your Privacy

An anonymous reader writes "A new device devised by Amsterdam graduate student Melanie Rieback is designed to serve as a portable firewall for RFID tags. The portable battery-powered RFID Guardian uses an access control list to filter RFID queries, blocking queries that aren't approved. Rieback, who is also known for being the first researcher to develop a proof of concept RFID virus, hopes to offer version 3.0 of the RFID Guardian to the public at cost."

Comments

proof of concept RFID virus

[bulliver]

So does that mean you could theoretically create a virus that would make all RFID enabled passports identify themselves as belonging to known/suspected terrorists? That would make for a million laughs on April 1...

What would really be fun

[eric76]

What would really be fun is to have a little credit card sized radio that would play with the various RFID tags it found.

Put it in your pocket and then walk down the aisles of your local WalMart.

Re:What would really be fun

[eric76]

To elaborate a bit, suppose a store used the RFID tags to ring up purchases at the store.

Your RFID reader would read various tags while you walk down the aisles of a store. Then, while you are near the checkout line, it would transmit them to a reader (it would have more distance than a passive tag) and provide the ids it read to the reader as if it were a tag. Someone standing in line to buy $25 worth of purchases would find the store rang it up to include two or three tvs, stereos, a dozen pairs of shoes, ..., adding up to several thousand dollars.

They would, I assume, notice that something was wrong and might have to ring them all up several times before you move away and they get the correct value.

Even simpler blocker

[noidentity]

I've found an even simpler RFID blocking solution.

Re:Back-compat?

[wizzahd]

It's a hat, duh. Do you realize how long it would take to make a tin foil jacket??