LuminousVoid

Wal Mart and the Defense department both are mandating RFID tags in some of the products they buy from some suppliers. According to a recent survey, it is these mandates that are driving RFID deployment.

Article discussing the report.
Report.

Let’s begin the blogging on RFID technology by starting with an RFID Primer. RFID stands for radio frequency identification. RFID differs from other identity technology, such as UPC bar codes, on two main points: effective range and namespace uniqueness.

There are active and passive RFID chips. Active chips contain a battery and transmit their identity. Passive chips work by reflecting back an active scan. Thus, unlike UPC bar codes on merchandise, they work at a range, currently 1-3 meters, and some vendors claim as much as 5 meters. They also work via some material, but can be effectively blocked by things such as aluminum foil. Note that the passive chips can cause problems when there is more than one scanner nearby, as they both will cause reflections to come from the chip.

Along with this range, it also important to note that RFID chips are currently promiscuous — they will always answer a generic scan, rather than wait for a scanner to provide some sort of activation code or other form of authentication.

Besides the ID at a distance difference between RFID and the traditional bar codes, RFID differs in another important way from traditional UPC bar codes. The RFID namespace allows each tag to be a unique identifier. Whereas barcodes are type identifiers (”I am a 12 ouce can of Coke”), RFID tags identify uniquely. (”I am this can of Coke, and not any other”). A current RFID standard has a 96-bit tag. Which means, barring any redundancy and error checking, that the namespace can describe 2^96, or 7.92 x 10^28, or 79.2 billion billion billion different identities.

A development in tags is to allow some sort of read/write memory on the chip, such that it could be updated and carry linked information (such as the name of the purchaser of the tagged item). Thus the information that the tag ID can be linked to would be available on the tag itself, and would not require access or sharing of databases that would contain this linked information. The tags therefore will decentralize some of the data associated with the physical item the tag is attached to, keeping data ogically related to a physical item on the item itself, rather than in a central and more tightly controlled database.

This combination of unique ID and promiscuous environmental scanning is what makes RFID so interesting from the privacy perspective.

Sources:
RFID in a nutshell - a primer on tracking technology
The Magic of RFID

I’m starting this blog to share/gather my thoughts on ongoing tech law issues.

I’ll be following the P2P case closely, as I’m writing a paper on it. Hard to write a paper with a strong thesis for a circuit split [aside: I don’t think it’s a split, it’s mostly dicta] that has been granted cert.

I’m taking a privacy law class, and would like to start teaching myself about RFID concurrent with that. So I plan on blogging RFID, and the privacy and counter-measures issues it brings up.

I’m also in a seminar on multi-national IP protection. It should be really interesting, and there’s so much going on there that I don’t even know where to start in looking for a paper topic.