Wednesday, March 15, 2006
RFID Virus Predicted
RFID Virus Predicted: "Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo, and Andy Tanenbaum have a new paper describing how RFID tags might be used to propagate computer viruses.
The underlying technical argument is pretty simple. An RFID tag is a tiny device, often affixed to a product of some sort, that carries a relatively small amount of data. An RFID reader is a larger device, often stationary, that can use radio signals to read and/or modify the contents of RFID tags.
Simple RFID tags are quite simple and only carry data that can be read or modified by readers. Tags cannot themselves be infected by viruses. But they can act as carriers, as I’ll describe below.
One common class of bugs involves bad handling of unexpected or diabolical input values. For example, web browsers have had bugs in their URL-handling code, which caused the browsers to either crash or be hijacked when they encountered diabolically constructed URLs. When such a bug existed, an attacker who could present an evil URL to the browser (for example, by getting the user to navigate to it) could seize control of the browser.
A virus attack might start with a single RFID tag carrying evil data. When a vulnerable reader scanned that tag, the reader’s bug would be triggered, causing the reader to execute a command specified by that tag. The command would reconfigure the reader to make it write copies of the evil data onto tags that it saw in the future. "
The underlying technical argument is pretty simple. An RFID tag is a tiny device, often affixed to a product of some sort, that carries a relatively small amount of data. An RFID reader is a larger device, often stationary, that can use radio signals to read and/or modify the contents of RFID tags.
Simple RFID tags are quite simple and only carry data that can be read or modified by readers. Tags cannot themselves be infected by viruses. But they can act as carriers, as I’ll describe below.
One common class of bugs involves bad handling of unexpected or diabolical input values. For example, web browsers have had bugs in their URL-handling code, which caused the browsers to either crash or be hijacked when they encountered diabolically constructed URLs. When such a bug existed, an attacker who could present an evil URL to the browser (for example, by getting the user to navigate to it) could seize control of the browser.
A virus attack might start with a single RFID tag carrying evil data. When a vulnerable reader scanned that tag, the reader’s bug would be triggered, causing the reader to execute a command specified by that tag. The command would reconfigure the reader to make it write copies of the evil data onto tags that it saw in the future. "
