Miss Behavin

Why does the government continue to cover up RFID insecurities?

August 11th, 2008

The EFF addressed that the government continues to try and shield the public from how insecure RFID technology is today. District Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts granted a temporary restraining order requested by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for three students trying to expose the weakness in the technology..

The MBTA sought to bar three students enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — from presenting a talk at DefCon about vulnerabilities in magnetic stripe tickets and RFID cards that are used in the MBTA’s payment system.

The MBTA feared that the students planned to teach the audience how to fraudulently use the cards without additional payments to the system.

The EFF believes the judge’s order sets a dangerous precedent. EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman told reporters:

“Basically, what the court is suggesting here is that giving a presentation involving security to other security researchers is a violation of federal law,” she said. “As far as I know, this is completely unprecedented, and it has a tremendous chilling effect on sharing this sort of research. . . . And we intend to fight it with everything we’ve got.”

My questions however are as follows:

• Why did the MBTA invest in such an easily corruptable technology?
• Is there any relation to the opposed use of RFID in the REAL ID linked to this?
• Seriously-this technology sucks. Why is anyone using it for transaction or identification purposes?

Entry Filed under: Free Speech, Privacy rights, REAL ID