We reported about a week ago that an academic research team had published a paper, cleverly titled “Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?”, suggesting that RFID tags might be a vector for computer intrusion.
AIM Global, an association comprised of, “…manufacturers or service providers of technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID), bar code, card technologies (magnetic stripe, smart card, contactless card, optical card), biometrics, and electronic article surveillance (EAS)….” has put together a statement refuting the claims in the students’ paper. Some highlights:
In response to this paper, these experts emphasize that there are two broad types of RFID tags, ones that have pre-encoded or fixed data and ones that have data that can be changed. Systems with fixed data such as those used to identify pets cannot be changed and therefore are immune to infection by a virus. So RFID animal tags are safe for your pets and cannot spread data viruses.[….]
Being able to insert a virus into the system implies a tag contains executable code that is recognized by the software. This is simply not possible with many applications of RFID since they look for specific kinds of data and will either flag or reject anything that doesn’t fit the data template.
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