GeekLimit

RFID tagging: the new security breach (part 1)

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

You may have heard of the plans for putting RFID tags in American passports. This isn’t anything new, Wired wrote about it some time ago. RFID chipping a passport is no different than chipping your dog. A reader gets close to your chip, sends a signal to it, and the chip responds with whatever information it has been programmed with. In the case of passports, people are afraid that their passport will be broadcasting personal information like a social security number. The bad part is that anyone can provoke the RFID chip to broadcast its information, simply by asking for it with a reader, which can be concealed easily. Some states are starting to put them in driver’s licenses also, which really makes security a problem.

Obviously, the correct solution to this problem is to have the RFID tag not broadcast anything that can be used to personally identify you. Perhaps it can broadcast a unique “RFID number”. Only the people authorized to have your information would be able to link your harmless RFID number to your bank information, for example.

However, as we’ve seen in the past, you can’t leave it up to the government, hotels, etc. to guard your information. Past expirience has shown that they simply don’t care enough to take the proper measures to protect your information. In this last link, you can read about how many hotel keycards have your information on them, sometimes including your credit card number, in unencrypted format. You can buy a card reader for under $75, which would turn a hotel garbage can into a multi-thousand dollar jackpot.

As far as RFID goes, if the companies/government use the same lax security, someone can steal this information simply by standing near you, putting a reader in a fake switch on the wall of a public place, etc. In addition, if your company/government waned to, they could install readers everywhere, and record your every movement.

So far, you’re pretty much stuck begging the legislators to promise to be secure with your information. I’ll get into how to protect yourself in another posting.

Comments (0) | December 13th, 2005