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NEWS ... GLOBAL NEWS ... experts fear that if CIFA merges with, or, RFID CHIPS FALL PREY TO EASY HACKING in effect, takes over DSS, there would be a hey can steal your smart card, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in weakening of the safeguards that are your arm. And you won't feel a thing. supposed to regulate the release of the RFID chips are everywhere: companies and labs use them in access keys, Prius owners estimated 4.5 million security files on | use them to start their cars, and retail giants like Wal-Mart have deployed them as defence-contractor employees currently | inventory tracking devices. Drug manufacturers like Pfizer rely on chips to track controlled by DSS. Those files are stored | pharmaceuticals. The tags are also about to get a lot more personal: next-generation US ma disused mine in western Pennsylvania. passports and credit cards will contain RFIDs, and the medical industry is exploring the Defence analyst and Washington Post | use of implantable chips to manage patients. blogger Bill Arkin, who first brought According to the RFID market analysis firm IDTechEx, the push for digital inventory allegations about CNAs domestic 8p vite tracking and personal ID systems will expand the current annual market for RFIDs from waste and better coordinate intelligence US$277 billion to as aul as $26 billion by ADK, activities, "we are creating an American Dozens of companies, from Motorola to Philips to Texas Instruments, manufacture the military ‘secret police that is clearly chips. The tags work by broadcasting a few bits of information to specialised electronic acquiring way too much information and readers. Most commercial RFID chips are passive emitters, which means they have no way too much power". onboard battery; they send a signal only when a reader powers them with a squirt of (Source: Newsweek, 14 April 2006, electrons. Once juiced, these chips broadcast their signal indiscriminately within a certain http:/hwww.msnbe.msn.com/id/12290187/site/ | 8° usually a few inches to a few feet. Active emitter chips with internal power can send signals hundreds of feet; these are used in the automatic toll-paying devices that sit on car dashboards, pinging tollgates as autos whiz through. OLD SHIPS' LOGBOOKS For protection, RFID signals can be encrypted. The chips that will go into passports, UNLOCK EARTH'S MYSTERIES for example, will likely be coded to make it difficult for unauthorised readers to retrieve he Earth's magnetic field has weakened _| their onboard information (which will include a person's name, age, nationality and by five per cent each century since photo). But most commercial RFID tags don't include security, which is expensive. This 1840, when the first accurate measurements _| leaves most RFIDs vulnerable to cloning or—if the chip has a writable memory area, as were made. But a new study looking at the | many do—data tampering. Chips that track product shipments or expensive equipment, magnetic field strength between 1590 and_ | for example, often contain pricing and item information. These writable areas can be 1840 finds the field was relatively stable | locked, but often they aren't because the companies using RFIDs don't know how the newsweek/) during that time. chips work or because the data fields need to be updated frequently. Either way, these The modelling of historical magnetic _ | chips are open to hacking. data was started in the early 1980s by study "The world of RFID is like the Internet in its early stages," says Ari Juels, research team member David Gubbins, a researcher | manager at the high-tech security firm RSA Labs. "Nobody thought about buildin, g g y ry g g from the University of Leeds, UK. The | security features into the Internet in advance, and now we're paying for it in viruses and researchers began with readily available other attacks. We're likely to see the same thing with RFIDs." data like those in the logbooks of famed Take the Future Store. Located in Rheinberg, Germany, the Future Store is the world's English sailor and explorer, James Cook. pre-eminent test bed of RFID-based retail shopping. All the items in this high-tech , Gubbins told LiveScience that they then supermarket have RFID price tags, which allow the store and individual product progressed to searching archives In manufacturers—Gillette, Kraft, Procter & Gamble—to gather instant feedback on what's Europe" and also found "50,000 ‘lost’ 18th- | peing bought. Meanwhile, shoppers can check out with a single flash of a reader. In July century measurements in the East India 2004, Wired hailed the store as the "supermarket of the future". A few months later, Company archives in London , logbooks German security expert Lukas Grunwald hacked the chips. hi ee : ded