The Trouble with RFID
Recently RFID has been in the cross-hairs of every media outlet. With big businesses and some government offices finding more uses for the technology, the general public is starting to feel a little on edge. Accusations started flying: concerned citizens groups fear this technology could lead to a totalitarian state comparable to Orwell’s 1984 and some religious groups even declared RFID to be related to biblical tales of Armageddon.
“The unfortunate thing about that is once [a group] makes such a claim or statement, from that point on, it puts the RFID industry on the defensive,” said Max Golter, vice president of sales at Bielomatik, a manufacturer of RFID production machines headquartered in Neuffen, Germany. “I think all these accusations are coming from people who are reacting impulsively,” he said.
Indeed among the general public, misconceptions about the abilities of RFID tags and readers are abundant. Those in the industry know RFID tags cannot transmit data unless in the presence of a reader. And so far the small, self contained-tags cannot be outfitted with GPS transmitters. Visions of commercial or government bodies tooling around residential neighborhoods while inventorying a home’s contents and monitoring its residents are not realistic.
But some of the groups have done significant research into the potential uses (and abuses) of RFID technology. Though many RFID industry organizations tout the multifaceted utility of these chips, they cannot escape the original intention of RFID systems. “RFID is great for tracking,” said Mike Caulley, resident of Plastic Printing Professions, a division of Document Security Systems based in Daly City, Calif. “It can be adapted to do a lot of different things but tracking is where it really gets used well.” And tracking is precisely what frightens privacy advocates and consumer rights groups.
Unlike many visions of a dystopia future, in a society oppressed by RFID there would be little visible evidence of the machinery. This is the cause of concern for many. If placed strategically in a city, relatively few sensors could monitor the majority of citizens’ movements. So the battle for public opinion rages on.
While any technology certainly can be used to the detriment of society, the benefits of RFID are too great to ignore. Despite the political battle over the technology, RFID is a growing market with applications in almost every industry.
From hospitals to pharmaceuticals, RFID can be used to prevent potentially life-threatening situations. RFID enabled “smart” hospital bracelets could reduce human error dramatically. In many instances of medical error patients receive blood transfusion of the wrong blood type or receive medications they are allergic to. With an innovative RFID system, an alarm might sound if these substances came too close to a patient.
More advanced RFID tags can be equipped with battery power and sensors. A package with such sophisticated tags could prevent a shipment of food or drugs from ending up in consumers’ hands if it was compromised due to improper conditions such as temperature. Preventing disease or illness only a few times would outweigh the cost of the tags. Lawsuits and recalls are costly, and it only takes one death to tarnish a company’s image for a long time.
Sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease are often in danger of wandering away from their caretakers. In nursing homes, RFID can be used to keep track of senile patients and allow hospital staff to be notified if they leave the building.
RFID key cards are commonplace now. The systems have been embraced for their security benefits. For one, lost cards can removed from the computer’s list of viable keys. This is like changing the lock only for lost keys. Computerized key-card systems also prevent anonymous entry. Since each key is individually numbered it is possible to detect who has entered or left thus preventing fraud or theft. Until recently this has been almost flawless from a security point of view.
Cards have a deficiency though: They can be lost or stolen. To address this concern, some companies are now offering implantable tags to employees instead of a card in their wallet. Recently a large manufacturer began pushing for the United States military to use implantable tags in troops instead of traditional dog-tags. Implantable tags seemed foolproof in their ability to stop would-be identity or key thieves. This is no longer true.
In increasing frequency, security experts and computer scientists across the globe are raising concerns about RFID. As many of these legal hackers have pointed out, the technology is being implemented faster than problems are being addressed. In the past few months Wired magazine published several articles in which technology savvy citizens showed how they were able to steal information from RFID key cards, body implants, and even the new RFID enabled passports. Once obtained, this information could be used to forge said cards, implants and passports or attack the carrier. The worrisome aspect of these crimes is that, unlike traditional methods, the RFID criminal does not have to actually have any physical contact with the victim. Information can be stolen or accessed simply coming close to an RFID reader (maybe hidden in the criminal’s palm and connected to a laptop computer in his or her backpack or covertly installed in a doorway).
Mike Caulley, president of Plastic Printing Professions, a division of Document Security Systems based in Daly City, Calif., feels the fear is unjustified. “Realistically how much is that happening and what do you need to know?” he asks. “Do you need to be some sort of graduate from a physics lab to figure all that out, or is the average guy who graduated from high school going to be able to figure that out?” Right now the answer to such questions falls closer to the physicist. While Caulley’s statements are currently true, they lack forward thinking. In the 1970s stealing data off a computer would have only been possible for a computer scientist. In the early days of computers, the vast majority of citizens would not even know how to interface with the computer to do any task, let alone find security holes. These days, teenagers have been known to compromise government computers. The simple explanation for this is the ubiquity of computers and information about how they work. As the technology becomes widely available, security holes and methods to capitalize on them will become available also.
Some groups and individuals in the RFID industry are pushing to encrypt chip information, but cost is the hurdle facing RFID security advocates. Standard RFID chips hold limited data. Chips with greater storage capacity cost more money and require framework to support them. This leads to increased costs, and increased costs make many tagging purposes economically infeasible. When the new RFID enabled passports were in development, the U.S. government made the decision not to encrypt the information at all mainly to reduce cost. Only after significant public outcry was it decided that the passport data would be incorporate low-level encryption. The result is a RFID passport data that can be cracked in relatively little time. The money saved does not appear to be worth the compromise anymore.
In the near future high-level encryption could be added to almost any chip in an economical fashion. Computer and microchip technology is known for steadily decreasing costs and steadily improving functionality. Secure chips may become inexpensive, but if the infrastructure to support them is not in place then they will be useless.
In addition movements towards encryption, Golter explained, “There’s some forward thinking here to kill [per item level] tags.” The idea is to deactivate tags on common items after they are sold. Such movements aim to appease consumer rights groups and privacy advocates who fear tags affixed to their purchases could be used for tracking.
Implantable RFID tags raise concerns beyond tracking and security. Numerous ethical issues arise whenever identification is artificially affixed to a human body. Caulley mentioned the limits of public acceptance when it comes to such uses: “I think in its place [RFID is] good. What it’s used for right now–tracking packages–is wonderful.” Caulley noted that once the technology moves into other areas of tracking (like people) it begins to generate fear and anger. Tracking humans is a slippery slope. An unfortunate reminder of this is the promise made when Social Security Numbers were issued. At that time the government claimed the number was not meant to be, and never would be, used as a personal identification number. So much for promises.
For now, no one knows how deeply RFID will affect society and business. The markets are opening wider as giant retailers, like WalMart, implement the technology, other businesses will soon follow. Manufactures and distributors in the printing business need to be ready to fill the market’s demand but not at the expense of other business. As Mark Freeman, president of Inspec Tech, a label solutions provider based in Valley Head, Ala., explained, RFID tags will never replace bar-codes. Freeman sees the two systems coexisting because they meet different price points. “There’s no way that [RFID tags] are going to get down to one thousandths of a penny, and that’s what a bar code will cost you,” he said.
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- Inspec Tech