Anatomy of a spy-chip
p2pnet.net News:- Why is RFID making a splash now, given that the idea is at least 40 years old?
Good question, and it’s posed by Intel researcher Roy Want in his Queue post, The Magic of RFID.
The popular press often paints RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as a benign and helpful form of technology.
Want obviously sees RFID in this context – that’s to say, helpful – and says, ” Today, they provide greater functionality, reading range, and speed of data transfer [that 40 years ago]. As a result, they support the ability to accurately read a large number of co-located tags at the same time.”
However, there’s an equal, if not greater, potential for allowing government agencies and commerical interests to use RFID devices to ’spy’ on people. They’re also health hazards, says CASPIAN’s (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) Katherine Albrecht.
With that in mind, Want gives an interesting break-down of a chip, namely:
“An RFID system is composed of readers and tags. Readers generate signals that are dual purpose: they provide power for a tag, and they create an interrogation signal. A tag captures the energy it receives from a reader to supply its own power and then executes commands sent by the reader. The simplest command results in the tag sending back a signal containing a unique digital ID (e.g., the EPC-96 standard uses 96 bits) that can be looked up in a database available to the reader to determine its identity, perhaps expressed as a name, manufacturer, SKU (stock keeping unit) number, and cost.
“An RFID tag is built from three components:
- Antenna
- Silicon chip
- Substrate or encapsulation material
“These tags are generally referred to as passive because they require no batteries or maintenance. Tag operation varies according to the frequency at which the tag operates. Historically, four common ISM (industrial, scientific, medical) frequency bands have been used: 128 kilohertz, 13.56 megahertz, 915 megahertz, and 2.45 gigahertz.”
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See:-
health hazards – Spy chip health hazards, p2pnet, October 22, 2004
break-down – The Magic of RFID, Queue, October, 2004
