A Hacker's Guide to RFID Spoofing and Jamming

Presented at DEF CON 14 (2006), Aug. 4, 2006, 7 p.m. (50 minutes)

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are remotely-powered data carriers that augment physical objects with wireless computing abilities. This allows us to create smart homes and offices, optimize our supply chains, and keep a watchful eye on our pets, livestock, and kids. But unfortunately, RFID security and privacy issues have been addressed as an afterthought; it is regretfully easy to interfere with RFID systems, as many rely upon the integrity of RFID tag data for their correct functioning. To illustrate these problems, we have built a handheld device that performs RFID tag spoofing and selective RFID tag jamming (a bit like an "RFID firewall"). Compatible with the ISO 15693/14443 13.56 MHz RFID standards, our device is battery-powered and fits into a shirt pocket. This presentation will explain the "nuts and bolts" of RFID tag spoofing and jamming attacks, and will conclude with a live practical demonstration of these attacks.


Presenters:

  • Melanie Rieback - RFID Security/PrivacyResearcher
    Melanie Rieback is a Ph.D. student in Computer Systems at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where she is supervised by Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. Melanie's research concerns the security and privacy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and she leads multidisciplinary research teams on RFID privacy management (RFID Guardian) and RFID security (RFID Malware) projects. Melanie's recent work on RFID Malware has attracted worldwide attention, appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, UPI, de Volkskrant, Computable, Computerworld, Computer Weekly, CNN, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and many other print, broadcast, and online news outlets. Melanie has also served as an invited expert for RFID discussions involving both the American and Dutch governments. In a past life, Melanie also worked on the Human Genome Project at the MIT Center for Genome Research / Whitehead Institute. She was part of the public genome sequencing consortium, and is listed as a coauthor on the seminal paper 'Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome', which appeared in the journal Nature.

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