[IP] Spy chips under discussion

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <amicus@well.com>
Date: October 3, 2004 1:54:10 AM EDT
To: johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [johnmacsgroup] Spy chips under discussion
Reply-To: johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com


At 10:34 PM 10/2/2004, A Grudko wrote:
> Spy chips will be perfectly copied by criminals and abused by
> over-enthusiastic political supporters/government officials.

RFID use in counterfeiting doesn't rely on the *chips* being 
uncopiable...
they're trivially replicated.  The idea here is that, via the unique ID 
in
the chip, you'd be able to ascertain the item's (claimed) pedigree, and
figure out if it was plausible that the item you had in your hand 
matched
the reported history.  So, for example, you read the RFID (or, probably,
human readable copy printed on the label) on a bottle of pills and query
somebody/somebodies over the Internet, which would tell you that that
bottle was part of a shipment that was delivered to [your local 
retailer,
in your local town] within the last several days, etc.  If you do the
lookup and are told that the bottle was last seen yesterday in 
Ouagadougou,
Paris, or Chengdu, or sold to an end consumer last week, you start to 
get
suspicious.

I'm actually quite skeptical that this is going to work (and will be
writing on that and other item-level tagging issues for a piece to run 
in
one of the RFID mags); if it *does* work, yes, it'll be a fantasy
playground for privacy violators too.

Ross



-----

Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D., CISSP
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
http://www.stapleton-gray.com

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