Is Your Cat Infected With a Computer Virus?

Study Says Chips in ID Tags Are Vulnerable to Viruses
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: March 15, 2006
some excerpts from the New York Times at nytimes.com

In the researchers' paper, "Is Your Cat Infected With a Computer
Virus?," the group, affiliated with the computer science department at
Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, also describes how the vulnerability
could be used to undermine a variety of tracking systems.

The researchers said they realized that there are risks associated with
publishing security vulnerabilities in computerized systems. To head
off some of the possible attacks they described, they have also
published a set of steps to help protect RFID chips from such attacks.

The group, led by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, an American computer scientist,
will make the presentation at the annual Pervasive Computing and
Communications Conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers. Mr. Tanenbaum is the author of the Minix
operating system, an experimental project that became the heart of the
Linux open-source operating system.

amazing. glad i held off until i can get a certified virus free chip

Azy wrote:
I have to question the whole thing. The chips aren't really connected
to anything. The only way they are accessed is with the chip reader,
so is it the chip or the reader that is virus prone? Matter of fact,
is it the chip, the reader, or just the Database itself? I'd have to
see where the vulnerability exists before I really worried about it. I
mean, for ages I heard a load of hype about y2k and so forth, but I
owned several computers that were never updated and I lost nothing.
Not a single bit of info missing.

It's a theoretical scientific article so hard to answer your questions
from the newspaper article which was a bit general and for the lay
public.

Again, this is not an article about what happened, it's a computer
science article what is theoretically able to occur. The actual article
may give steps and ways to prevent this.

The points you raise I don't know because I have not read the
scientific article but it would be interesting if the corruption would
go back to the database or the chip itself. If the chip is an EPROM of
some type, one wonders how difficult it would be to corrupt the chip if
it is scanned only in Read-Only Mode. I wonder to corrupt the chip one
would have to corrupt also the scanner and have to do a Write. And in
the past writes take quite a bit of time, but who knows now.

This is maybe along the lines of virii getting into cell phones.
Originally that was thought to be impossible. But people are quite good
at destructive things and can put a virus or some sort of disruption
into almost anything, even document files which were also thought to be
immune before Word Macros.

I remember getting an email from McGraw-Hill which contained an MS Word
document that had a very literary named virus attached! How
appropriate. Fortunately, the virus was relatively harmless and just
messed up the summary documentation of the basic document.

On 2006-03-15, penned:

The points you raise I don't know because I have not read the
scientific article but it would be interesting if the corruption
would go back to the database or the chip itself. If the chip is an
EPROM of some type, one wonders how difficult it would be to corrupt
the chip if it is scanned only in Read-Only Mode. I wonder to
corrupt the chip one would have to corrupt also the scanner and have
to do a Write. And in the past writes take quite a bit of time, but
who knows now.

I can imagine that one could overwrite a chip's data with some other
data.

It's hard to imagine it being able to do much more than that. As far
as I know it has no ability to actively send a signal.

--
monique, who spoils Oscar unmercifully

pictures: http://www.bounceswoosh.org/rpca