The prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected. Since the vet (or ASPCA) uses this database when creating tags for newly-tagged animals, these new tags can also be infected. When they are later scanned for whatever reason, that database is infected, and so on. Unlike a biological virus, which jumps from animal to animal, an RFID virus spread this way jumps from animal to database to animal.
I ignored this article this morning but its actually pretty cool. SQL injection, CSS, and buffer overflows from data stored in RFIDs is a vector that few people have really looked at. I wonder if the new U.S. Passports are vulnerable? RFID Viruses: Is your cat infected with a computer virus? |