While the above represents sizable privacy and security risks, the current reality of arphid deployment mitigates these risks. Currently passive arphids do not have enough memory to hold a truly unique indentifying number. They can hold the same amount of data that a UPC code holds, but a UPC code only identifies a product’s name and description and does not hold a unique identifier for that individual product. Further, the current generations of arphids are very expensive compared to printed bar-code labels. The lowest cost arphid tags cost 7.2 cents per tag where bar-code labels may cost less than a penny a label. New passports are being issued which use arphid chips to store the passport information, but the data is encrypted and requires the passport holder to input a PIN number before the passport data can be read. Further, the physical passport will contain shielding that prevents any long-range reading of passport data.
There are no active projects to store driver’s license or medical information on arphid chips. Several states have already passed laws requiring manufacturers, retailers and others to ensure placement of a label regarding existence of arphids on product prior to sale.
Article comments
1 - [GEEKS ARE SEXY] Tech. News
It was in the news recently that RFID chips could get infected by some new kind of viruses.. for those that are interested in this subject, you might want to have a look at this site that explains the process in detail.
Cheers!
Kiltak
[Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News
2 - John Vaccaro
Turns out that the virus was information stored on the chip which when fed into a vulnerable backend system caused a problem. If the vulnerable system had been patched and/or the backend properly designed whetever is stored on the arphid would not negatively impact the system as a whole.
3 - iTech
I agree with the posts above. RFID does not receive as much attention as it should be. The above link provides a valid find about vulnerabilities. In addition RFID tags pose a huge privacy issue as it would not only be used in commercial areas but also for tracking purposes.
Does everyone have their tin-foil hat on?
4 - DIFRWear
I recently started up a company that sells RFID blocking wallets and passport cases. Take back control of your privacy. gizmodo post
5 - jesus
Mark of the beast <- look that up
6 - Alex Jones
wow thats crazy, in the bible it states that "thou shall not wear the mark of the beast, which in this case is the RFID chips soon to be implanted into everyone
7 - Lex
DIFRWear, I guess when you open your wallet you are screwed, hopefully she's blond and cheap.
Nice invention!
Lex
8 - yoozeguyz
Just FYI, "RFID for Dummies" is not the definitive work on RFID...it has more than a few factual errors in it (this from some of the people who contributed to it). [And please, it's "RFID" (Radio Frequency ID) not "arfids."] But, the more you learn about the various forms of RFID (and the underlying physics), the less scary it becomes (in fact, its performance is pretty wretched in many applications). Yes, some types of RFID tags can be "hacked" (but it's much harder when security and good database design are really employed) but you're more in danger of having the computer you use corrupted by worms, trojans and viruses.