Last week I mentioned the relation between anti-static bags and EZ-passes. I very briefly mentioned the blocking of transmissions and its relation to RFID security. In this post I’ll go a little more in-depth. RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification System. It’s a widely used technology that is being used in toll readers, corporate ID cards, public transportation debit cards, and even credit cards. Not to sound alarmist, but there’s an ever increasing chance that you have some sort of sensitive information stored on an RFID tag.
The concern about RFID is the same for any technology: unintended use. RFID readers are not terribly difficult to build. They should be too, because innovation has effects on the economy in both seen and unseen ways. However, if an RFID tag is not properly secured, the proliferation of RFID readers becomes problematic. For example, an RFID tag in your pocket might be read by a passerby and all of the tag’s information stored on the offending reader. This can be compared to an airplane radio drown out your FM radio station or even your cordless telephone picking up your neighbor’s phone call. With radio frequency technology there will be unintended occurrences, it’s an inevitability.
The risks of unintended reading can be mitigated. Banks on the internet figured out that users information traveling back and forth between their servers and the user’s computer was open to interception. They decided to encrypt the data, rendering it useless if it was intercepted. The same idea can be applied to RFID technology. If the data stored on the RFID tag is encrypted, any scan by an unwelcome reader would not jeopardize the private information stored on the tag.
I hope it doesn’t take long for the encryption to be common place, these things are spreading like wildfire. Wikipedia has a list, although partial I’m sure, of some current uses of the technology. In the mean time, anti-static bags work at blocking out the signals. I’ve heard of people lining their wallets with anti-static bag material to protect against unintended transmission of the data, although I wouldn’t go this far myself. Your mileage may vary. I might consider long term storage in an anti-static bag though.
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