#rfids

From the #Factory to Doorsteps, Empowered #Customers Want #Mobility! #Logistics #RFID #ZebraTechnologies #BlockChain

‘Customer is God’ – read the plaque (in Tamil) hanging above the counter of this roadside eatery I dared to enter on my latest sojourn. I noticed it specially because the restaurant refused to serve me anything I chose from it’s menu and my stomach’s growling made me accept the gruel they gave as lunch. As I paid the owner made grumpy noises and as I thought of the irony that the plaque was…

While shopping online (or perhaps even in person), have you ever come across this?

Ever wondered what that’s all about? What in the name of sanity is an RFID?

RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification. It’s “been around for a long time, one of its original uses being the identification of aircraft during the Second World War,” but until recently they were (ironically) too expensive to have commercial value (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). With the advancements in technology, however, they’ve become embedded into nearly every facet of our lives.

If you drive a Prius, that’s what allows you to turn it on. Do you have a tap sensor on your bank card? That’s RFID at work as well. It’s how Wal-Mart keeps track of its inventory. It’s in your Canadian passport. It’s also likely in your work ID badge, if it doubles as a keycard. Oh, and it might be in your library books.

No, not ebooks - I mean the hardcopy stuff.

RFIDs are tiny, but they control our world to perhaps an even greater extent than the Internet, because unlike the ‘net, cutting a few choice cables would do nothing to cease their use, since they are (to a large extent) self contained.

Surprised you’ve never heard of them being splashed all over the news? You should be. Because those tiny things that manage your bank card’s tap sensor are phenomenally easy to hack. All it takes is a bit of copper wire and a wallet-sized device called a cloner. They cost about $20 USD online, complete with keycard and keychain.

Heck, if you google it you can actually find guides to how to make your own cloner and how to use it (the first cloner image came from one such guide).

I know what you’re thinking - it can’t be that easy.

But it really, really is.

Where before RFIDs cost a pretty penny, “[a]dvances in technology have both reduced the cost of individual system components and provided increased capabilities, to the point where numerous organizations are either using or considering using RFID technology” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Nowadays you can buy rolls of RFID stickers with various levels of capability and range. In 2005 “[a] typical passive RFID chip [cost] about a quarter, whereas one with encryption capabilities [ran at] about $5” (Newitz).

Now, here’s what bothers me the most out of all this: why have we (the public, the plebs, what have you) not been taught about this when companies first started using them - especially since as little as ten years ago “it [was] just not cost-effective for your average office building to invest in secure chips . . . [leaving] most RFIDs vulnerable to cloning or – if the chip has a writable memory area, as many do – data tampering”? (Newitz) The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada warns us that “certain aspects of the technology – notably the small size of the tags and the ability to uniquely identify an object – pose potential threats to individual privacy.”

In a way, "the world of RFID is like the Internet in its early stages; nobody thought about building security features into the Internet in advance, and now we're paying for it in viruses and other attacks. We're likely to see the same thing with RFIDs," except that it’s much easier to tamper with RFID chips, since “writable areas can be locked . . . but often . . . aren't, because the companies using RFIDs don't know how the chips work or because the data fields need to be updated frequently” (Newitz). “Either way, [the end result is the same:] these chips are open to hacking” (Newitz). In other words: our bank cards, cars, and passports are basically like a laptop without any antivirus or firewalls.

And that’s really scary.

For further reading on this topic:

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s RFID fact sheet

For a more in-depth explanation, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario’s 2004 report, Tag, You’re It: Privacy Implications of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology

TD Bank’s answer to a customer question regarding RFIDs

RBC’s page on Interac Flash

This 2013 Global News article about a problematic smartphone app

This 2010 article by CBC

Sources used in the Making of this post

Camel Technology Co., Ltd. Mini Handheld 125Khz RFID Copier Duplicator Cloner ID EM Reader & Writer with 5pcs EM4305 Writable Cards or Keyfob. Digital image. AliExpress. AliExpress, n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

Canada. Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Tag, You’re It: Privacy Implications of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology. (2004)

Miller, Paul. How to clone yourself a VeriChip. Digital image. Engadget. n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2015. <http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/03/how-to-clone-yourself-a-verichip/>.

Newitz, Annalee. “The RFID Hacking Underground.” Wired Magazine 14:05 (2006)

RFID Blocking Passport Billfold. Digital image. Think Geek. Think Geek, n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2015. <http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/910f/>.

RFID Blocking Wallet. Digital image. Think Geek. Think Geek, n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2015. <http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/8cdd/>.