RFID for Industry

RFID tagging is familiar to many as means of identification. It is commonly used in automated gate pass and personnel accounting systems in many plants. Small rice grain sized units may be injected into animals for identification. Recently they have even inserted them into people as a security measure. The people doing this may not be getting all the security they were expecting. Jonathan Westhues has demonstrated and provided step by step instructions on how to clone implantable RFIDs. Apparently the Verichips aren't password protected, although that might not be much help. Adi Shamir a highly respected crypographer, the 'S' of RSA has demonstrated how analyzing environmental power consumption can yield passwords.

In recent weeks, Shamir used a directional antenna and digital oscilloscope to monitor power use by RFID tags while they were being read. Patterns in power use could be analyzed to determine when the tag received correct and incorrect password bits, he said.

"The reflected signals contain a lot of information," Shamir said. "We can see the point where the chip is unhappy if a wrong bit is sent and consumes more power from the environment…to write a note to RAM that it has received a bad bit and to ignore the rest of the string," he added.

"I haven’t tested all RFID tags, but we did test the biggest brand and it is totally unprotected," Shamir said. Using this approach, "a cellphone has all the ingredients you need to conduct an attack and compromise all the RFID tags in the vicinity," he added.

Shamir said the pressure to get tags down to five cents each has forced designers to eliminate any security features, a shortcoming that needs to be addressed in next-generation products.

The future of RFID tagging may not be in secure identification but in tagging and identifying product. There were 2 announcements by fabricators that show the industry is moving toward this direction this direction. Hitachi announces a very tiny chip that can be embedded in paper as a watermark. Phillips has a plastic RFID circuit which promises to be inexpensive. Both these technologies hold promises to improve the way we manufacture.

RFID tagging can enhance manufacturing quality and tracking, by tracking parts, from their source to final assembly automatically. A QC operator would be able to track the history of any part to its origins and manufacturing process. The same devices can be used track the finished products through transportation and distribution to the final retail sales.

Oil and chemical industries might find that tagging their product with the tiny tags will be a way of controlling inventory and marking batch lots. Addressing quality concerns sometimes involves knowing where the source of a product and its history. RFID with readers and basic database technologies will offer a lot of opportunities in the not so far off future.