RFID tags vulnerable to viruses, study says

IDG News Service - Three computer science researchers are warning that viruses embedded in radio tags used to identify and track goods are right around the corner, a danger that so far has been overlooked by the industry's high interest in the technology.

No viruses targeting radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have been released live yet, according to the researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. But RFID tags have several characteristics that could be engineered to exploit vulnerabilities in middleware and back-end databases, they wrote in a paper presented today at a conference in Pisa, Italy.

"RFID malware is a Pandora's box that has been gathering dust in the corner of our 'smart' warehouses and home," the paper stated.

The attacks can come in the form of a SQL injection or a buffer overflow attack even though the tags themselves may only store a small bit of information, the paper said. For demonstration purposes, the researchers created a proof-of-concept, self-replicating RFID virus.

Patrick Simpson, a master's student at the university, needed only four hours to write a virus small enough to fit on a RFID tag, something previously thought unworkable, said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. RFID tags can contain as little as 114 bytes of memory, he said.

Tanenbaum expects vendors to be angry about the publishing of the code. Vendors have dismissed the possibility of RFID viruses, saying that the amount of memory in the tags is too small, he said.

But the researchers did take precautions to ensure RFID viruses won't immediately circulate. They wrote their own middleware that mimicked traits of products on the market, said Melanie R. Rieback, one of the paper's authors.

"It's not like we are providing a cookbook for basically wannabe hackers to hack real RFID systems," Rieback said.

The homespun middleware connected to back-end databases from vendors such as Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. along with open-source databases such as MySQL and Postgres, Rieback said. The experiment used RFID equipment from Philips Electronics NV, she said.

"It was actually quite interesting to see that some of the databases were susceptible to some kinds of attacks," Rieback said. "Other ones actually had natural protection mechanisms built in that made them more resistant."

The purpose of the exercise, the authors wrote, is to encourage RFID middleware designers to be more careful when writing code. Back-end middleware can contain millions of lines of source code, and if software faults number between six and 16 per 1,000 lines of code, the programs are likely to have many vulnerabilities, the paper said.