Battle brewing over RFID chip-hacking demo
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Secure card maker HID Corp. is objecting to a demonstration of a hacking tool at this week's Black Hat Federal security conference in Washington, D.C. that could make it easy to clone a wide range of so-called "proximity" door access cards.
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As RFID-chipped passports gain adoption around the world, successful attempts to crack them are on the rise as well. Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have already reported compromised data, while countries such as New Zealand remain sure it can't happen there. But what if the goal wasn't data theft but detonation?
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Using radio scanners to wirelessly identify consumer products is simple in concept but dauntingly complex in reality.
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The Food and Drug Administration gives doctors the go-ahead to implant radio frequency microchips in patients. When scanned, the chips will release patients' medical information to doctors, speeding care.
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A vulnerability in radio-frequency ID chips could put millions of users of wireless car key tags or speed pass payment devices at risk, according to a recent study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and RSA Laboratories.
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InfoWorld - There's already an RFID security brouhaha brewing in Washington, and if some people have their way, it won't be the last legal fight waged in the nation's capital over use of the wireless technology.
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Adding a photosensor to an RFID tag yields a device that could track inventory, guide robots, and augment games.
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Radio-frequency identification is a technology that&#39;s touted as the replacement for the bar code. These postage-stamp-size RFID tags contain a tiny microchip that&#39;s smaller than a grain of sand and capable of storing information.
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Following a lawsuit threat, a security researcher goes ahead with a presentation on vulnerabilities in RFID access cards-- but doesn't demonstrate problems with HID Global's system. By Kim Zetter.
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Details from chip-and-pin cards could be stolen while shoppers make purchases, scientists say.
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While some debate whether you should destroy RFID tags by putting them in the microwave, worries about RFID privacy are real and growing, leading to more legislative controls.
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NASA plans to send a bundle of passive RFID chips to the International Space Station to determine whether the technology can survive in such conditions.
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Mobile devices are slowly becoming the targets of hackers, but a more serious threat could be the arrival of the intriguing software-defined radio, which uses software instead of circuitry.
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This week ObjectStore, a provider of technology designed to manage massive amounts of data in real time, will unveil RFID Accelerator. The company aims to give to supply chain capabilities similar to those used by financial institutions for executing programmatic trades on the stock exchange.Â
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Privacy advocates are concerned that an implantable microchip designed to help doctors tap into a patient&#39;s medical records could undermine confidentiality or could even be used to track the patient&#39;s movements.
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A custom chip powered a disputed demonstration of quantum computing by D-Wave Systems.
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(InfoWorld) - A planned talk on RFID security by a security researcher has been pulled from this week's Black Hat Federal security conference after secure card maker HID claimed the talk violated the company's patent rights and threatened to take legal action against Chris Paget, the researcher, and IOActive, Paget's employer, if the talk went forward. The company decided to cancel the talk after all-night negotiations with HID collapsed, said Josh Pennell, CEO of IOActive. In response, Black Hat organizers were forced to tear materials out of printed show proceedings and will instead present a discussion by a representative of the ACLU on the criticality of RFID security, said Jeff Moss, founder and director of Black Hat. A spokeswoman for HID did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The incident recalled a 2005 dispute over a presentation at Black Hat in Las Vegas involving Cisco Systems and Michael Lynn, a security researcher who worked for Internet Security Systems at the time. IOActive's decision to abort their presentation follows days of tense negotiations between the two companies, after HID became alarmed about Paget's discussion, "RFID for beginners," which was to address widespread security issues with the implementation of RFID in proximity cards that are sold by HID and other companies. Paget's RFID cloning device was on display at the recent RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, where he demonstrated for InfoWorld how the device could be used to steal access codes from HID brand proximity cards, store them, then use the stolen codes to fool a HID card reader. Paget's presentation at Black Hat Federal would have includedÂ  schematics and source code that attendees could use to create their own cloning device, and a discussion of vulnerable implementations of RFID technology in a wide variety of devices, Paget told InfoWorld at RSA earlier this month. HID claimed that Paget's talk would infringe upon two patents the company owns, one dating to 1991 and another dating to 1992. Both cover methods of detecting RFID signals between a transponder embedded in a device and an "interrogator," according to a source familiar with HID's claims. Pennell and others doubted that such broad patent claims could be used to stifle free speech, but said that the legal pressure mounted by HID, a subsidiary of Swedish firm ASSA ABLOY, was too much for his small, Seattle-based consulting firm to withstand. "If we say anything, HID will sue. These large companies have lots of resources, so they can find [legal] matter with pretty much anything," Pennell said, admitting disappointment at the failure to reach an agreement with HID. "It's always been IOActive's intent to help people with security," he said. Chris Paget said that, unlike Lynn's sophisticated hack of Cisco's IOS operating system, the RFID cloning devices he built were simple devices concocted from around $20 in off-the-shelf parts purchased on eBay. "This thing is simpler than a Furbie," he said, referring to the plush electronic play toy of years past. Moreover, the HID patents in question are public documents, containing all the information needed to build the RFID cloner, he said. "This is not something new that we're doing. HID has known about this for about two years, if not longer," Paget said. Indeed, HID marketing materials for its Smart Card technology notes that "by using diversified unique keys and industry standard encryption techniques, the risk of compromised data or duplicated (smart) cards is reduced," and that "these security measures are not implemented in proximity cards, giving contactless smart cards a significant security advantage." While it's possible to make secure RFID devices that can store sensitive information, the HID proximity cards that use it are not secure, and customers who use the cards need to know that, Paget said. "Our intent was to disseminate information so people could make informed decisions about RFID technology they're deploying. For example, whether to deploy a proximity card with a secondary factor like a biometric or PIN [personal ID number]. But we've been prevented by HID from discussing that, and we believe it's detrimental to the security community," he said.Â  Nicole Ozer, technology & civil liberties policy director at the ACLU of Northern California, said that the work IOActive was doing was vital and that, while the group supports the enforcement of patent law, "free speech must be protected and not "trampled by the overzealous use of patent law." Government agencies, including the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Homeland Security, have all raised concerns about RFID security, even as they issue guidelines for using RFID in passports and other documents, she said. "It's particularly important that the government and the public have all the information on RFID technology. The use of RFID without the proper protections could jeopardize privacy, security, and public safety," she said. For Moss and Black Hat, which is now part of CMP, the decision by IOActive to cancel Paget's talk was a discouraging reprise of the controversy two years ago over Michael Lynn's talk in Las Vegas. Show organizers, once again ripping pages out of conference proceedings at the request of IOActive, and recalling CDs containing copies of Paget's presentation. "We're supporting IOActive," Moss said, noting that CMP had its legal team working on behalf of IOActive to see if a solution could be reached. "I'm not sure if it was part of HID's strategy to drop a bomb at the last minute, but it really screwed up our conference strategy," he said.