Ping.
Well, you can understand the Credit Card Companies reaction, Geeks across the land would be building RFID readers and sending them to Kari to impress her...
Once again, like with the WGN situation, it’s the truth that is scary, not the fabrications.
I just love the small shot at Smash Lab. Damn that show sucks.
Used mostly for building access and package tracking today, RFID is not privacy friendly technology. With a range of at least 3 meters RFID chips can theoretically be hidden in products from laptops to shoes without the user’s knowledge and can be used to track the users movements and behavior across a network of scanners.
I know that one of the security problems is that the cards can be readily cloned - if you sniff a scanner, then sniff a card on that network you can clone the card as many times as you like just by duplicating the key.
Most businesses in major cities give employees RFID cards to use like building keys. We’ve started recommending that clients use RFID for secondary internal access only, say between zones or departments within a building, like access to server rooms. Primary access to a facility should be granted only after people have been identified by a less vulnerable means (Mark 1 eyeball for instance).
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID#Security_concerns
“Cryptographically-enabled tags typically have dramatically higher cost and power requirements than simpler equivalents, and as a result, deployment of these tags is much more limited. This cost/power limitation has led some manufacturers to implement cryptographic tags using substantially weakened, or proprietary encryption schemes, which do not necessarily resist sophisticated attack. For example, the Exxon-Mobil Speedpass uses a cryptographically-enabled tag manufactured by Texas Instruments, called the Digital Signature Transponder (DST), which incorporates a weak, proprietary encryption scheme to perform a challenge-response protocol for lower cost.”
Ping.
An RFID reader can read the info on your card while it is still in your wallet in your back pocket. Stay away from RFID cards.
bmflr
One of my Grad School papers was on the dangers of RFID. I wonder how they’d feel if I published my findings out on the ‘net (which included how hackable RFID was, and how easy it is to read.)
The crooks no doubt know about it already.
Nevertheless, it seems like Mythbusters should be helping the NY Times tip off terrorists on the various ways law enforcement agencies and the US military and intelligence communities track them. ;’)