Study: RFID tags vulnerable to viruses

By John Cox, NetworkWorld.com, 03/15/06

A group of researchers say they've shown that computer viruses can infect the microchips in radio frequency identification tags.

Their research paper, titled "Is your cat infected with a computer virus?," reportedly demonstrates how a virus can be injected into the tiny chip's even tinier memory.

An English version of the paper, in PDF format, is available online at rfidvirus.org.

The researchers, affiliated with a Dutch university, presented the paper at this weeks' annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, in Pisa, Italy.

One researcher is American Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of the Minix operating system. According to John Markoff's New York Times story, Tanenbaum explained that the team wrote software that mimicked commercial RFID software.

"We have not found specific flaws" in those products, Tanenbaum said. But commerical software written by large companies has errors, he said. Those errors create the vulnerabilities that a hostile program can exploit. The paper notes that inside information would be needed to plant a hostile progam in the microchip's memory.

"RFID malware is a Pandora's box that has been collecting dust in the corners of our 'smart' warehouses and homes," the researchers wrote in the paper.

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