Friday, February 22, 2008 10:03 AM/EST
Here's the bottom line. Besides the fundamental questions around security and privacy that need to be answered regarding RFID-chipped identification cards (and other systems), there is another looming issue: What are the societal impacts of a society that is potentially tracked at every step? Do you really want your daily whereabouts posted on Google Calendar and Twitter? The UW study seems to be addressing these very basic but necessary questions.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008 10:50 AM/EST
While many vendors in the retail sector seem to be scaling back their RFID operations - through an informal poll at the National Retail Federation's Big Show conference in November, everyone I asked said their RFID plans were on the way back burner due to lack of customer interest - the U.S. Department of Defense is increasing its RFID spend for the year with one vendor, Savi, by $60 million Savi, a Lockheed Martin company, said Monday that its total contract with the DoD now stands at $483 million. The DoD plans to spend the extra $60 million on the U.S. Army's Information Technology, E-Commerce and Commercial Contracting Center, better known in Army parlance as ITEC4. I put in an e-mail to Savi Monday to get a fuller understanding of what the contract details entail - an expansion of an existing project, or new initiatives - but haven't heard back...
Friday, February 01, 2008 5:10 PM/EST
There are two new updates this week in the world of RFID: The first is that as of Jan. 31 the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative mandate has kicked in. So if you plan on traveling between the US, Canada and any other contiguous and non-contiguous U.S. borders, either by land or sea, you better have some proof of citizenship. An oral statement of citizenry or an 'I didn't know that' won't cut it, according to a Jan. 18 statement from DHS. The second notable event is that some banks are willingly rescinding their RFID-chipped credit cards - if a consumer goes through the hassle of calling and requesting a new one.
Monday, January 14, 2008 6:36 PM/EST
The Smart Card Alliance has a plan for states looking to comply with the Real ID Act: secure technology that would help consumers safely transact. Using their driver's license. In response to the Department of Homeland Security's final Real ID Act ruling passed down last Friday the Smart Card Alliance - a not-for-profit, multi-industry association group "working to stimulate the understanding, adoption, use and widespread application of smart card technology" - wants the states to take this "golden opportunity" from the federal government to enhance their licenses with a Smart Card chip. The Smart Card Alliance spoke out against DHS's suggested use of RFID as a mandated, machine-readable technology that states would need to implement to comply with Real ID because of its security flaws. Its argument now, based on a statement released Monday, is that the Smart Card technology - despite being above and beyond the 2D machine-readable technology...
Monday, August 20, 2007 11:59 AM/EST
As a follow up to a blog I wrote last week about RFID reader vulnerabilities when used in conjunction with hacked RFID tags in electronic RFID-chipped passports, listed below are the email response to a few quick questions I jotted off to Lukas Grunwald, a security researcher and CTO at DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH in Germany. At DefCon earlier this month Grunwald demonstrated how a hacked e-passport could crash RFID readers. First he cloned a passport's chip and then modified the JPEG2000 image filed stored on the chip to create a buffer overflow condition - a vulnerability that makes things like the original Xbox easily exploitable, according to media reports. In 2006 Grunwald demonstrated that he could clone an RFID chip using the internationally accepted Civil Aviation Organization standards for e-passports to create a fake e-passport that would, in theory, pass customs inspection. Two years earlier Grunwald developed (and demondstrated)...
Monday, August 13, 2007 3:45 PM/EST
At about the same time I was flying back from Miami Aug. 12, thankful that the flight lasted only 2 hours and 55 minutes (my 4-year-old twins were just about doing summersaults by the end of the flight they were so antsy) about 20,000 international passengers were being detained either on the tarmac in cramped plane cabins or in customs at LAX, for hours on end. With limited food and water. With no possibility of making connecting flights or picking up stranded baggage. And absolutely no options to do anything else except wait - my personal version of hell when traveling with children. The problem at LAX: a malfunctioning U.S. Customs and Border Protection system that prevented customs agents from processing travelers' entry into the country, according to media reports. The Border Protection system maintains a list of people singled out by the Department of Homeland Security who should be...
Thursday, June 07, 2007 12:20 PM/EST
Feeling a little insecure about that RFID-chipped credit card or passport in your wallet? Rest easy. Chase Corp., a 61-year-old manufacturer of protective tapes and laminates, is bypassing the consumer route and targeting envelope and passport manufacturers with a new protective paper that will shield data from being surreptitiously tapped by just about any radio frequency, according to Jim Lordi, the founder of Paper Tyger, a division of Chase since 2003. Paper Tyger announced its new RFID Shield in early June. Lordi said that Chase works with a number of leading envelope manufacturers that in turn work with banks that offer RFID-chipped smart cards, so developing a product for RFID seemed like a natural evolution. The paper could be used to create sleeves that a card or passport would be tucked into, or envelopes that they would be sent through the mail in. The laminate in the paper would protect...
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 8:48 PM/EST
Despite a lackluster progress report on retailers buying RFID technology for case and pallet tagging, one area that is predicted to grow across vertical markets is active tags that require a battery to operate
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 3:37 PM/EST
RFID vendors can't get a break. Particularly in the retail sector, which has been targeted as a big growth area since big-box giants like Wal-Mart and Target jumped on board with RFID mandates for suppliers. An updated report by IDTechEx, a UK-based research firm, provides a glum look at RFID use in retail up to mid-2007, describing the market for tagging pallets and cases to meet retailer mandates as "still struggling to take off" for vendors. The issue, as one might guess: little demand for RFID tags. Sales, it seems, have been stymied by less-than-stellar read rates—a key metric for companies to measure RFID effectiveness. Below are some highlights from IDTechEx's May 29 report: The tagging of pallets and cases to meet retail mandates is still struggling to take off. In Q3 2005 many companies announced loss-leading tag prices in anticipation that it would overcome cost barriers and drive...
Friday, April 20, 2007 9:43 AM/EST
That RFID adoption has been slow on the up-tick is not big news. But two reports published this week by respected voices in the industry show surprising candor as to why RFID technology adoption is slogging. Health Industry Insights, an IDC-owned research firm, released a survey April 18 detailing why RFID adoption has failed to thrive in the pharma industry - despite some backing by the FDA. And an April 19 newsletter by AIM Global, the trade association for RFID, bar code and other "smart" technologies, debunks "myths" surrounding RFID. While AIM Global's RFID Connections editor Bert Moore tries the old reverse-psychology method of pointing out RFID's positives by concentrating on its perceived negatives, to me just acknowledging that issues exist is enough of a barometer that there are, in fact, issues. Rather than try and recap Moore's list, I'll replay it here almost in its entirety: Myth 1: RFID...
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