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[IP] Spy chips under discussion





Begin forwarded message:

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


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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