Privacy advocates worried about college libraries’ increasing use of radio-frequency identification tags will want to read "The RFID Hacking Underground," a piece in this month’s issue of Wired. In an attempt to show the security dangers posed by the tags, the magazine profiles five people, including David Molnar, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley who checks books out from the Oakland Public Library, takes them to his office, and uses a commercially available RFID reader to overwrite the data on their tags.
Mr. Molnar is just demonstrating how vulnerable the tags are, not trying to rip off the library. But he complains that the library’s decision not to lock the writable areas of its tags — a decision that other libraries across the country are likely also making — is a troubling oversight. (Wired)
For more on RFID tags, see an article from The Chronicle by Scott Carlson.
