Scary! Here is a complete tutorial on how to spend $50 worth of equipment to hack into anyone’s credit card embedded with RFIDs (radio frequency ID tags). The video says $8, but others say this is too cheap a price tag. And Nokia and others are currently putting RFID readers in cell phones – you can already buy models with this feature in the open market. All you need is the software.
Solutions:
No need to disable the chip.
The antenna circulates near the rim of the card, and cutting it apart is quite enough to disable it (or putting it in a wallet which has a conductive metal surface).
RFIDBlockr Blog This is a wallet sold which has a copper lining. It’s big enough for passports, too.
Someone found the location of the chip in their Chase Card:
According to a Washington Post article, new passports will also be issued with this technology:
Although the chip is passive and can be read only when a reader pings it, a reader with a strong battery can detect the chip’s signal from as far as 40 feet away, Schwartz said. It can easily be cloned, posing the risk that a hacker could make a duplicate card to fool a border agent, he said. Avi Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that two years ago, he duplicated an RFID chip in his “speedpass” used for buying gas, copied the information onto a laptop and, after extending a radio antenna from the laptop out the car door, was able to buy gas with the cloned RFID chip. Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, represents technology firms that make another kind of RFID chip, one that can only be read up close, and he is critical of the passport card’s technology. It offers no way to check whether the card is valid or a duplicate, he said, so a hacker could alter the number on the chip using the same techniques used in cloning. “Because there’s no security in the numbering system, a person who obtains a passport card and is later placed on a watchlist could easily alter the number on the passport card to someone else’s who’s not on the watchlist,” Vanderhoof said.