Melanie Rieback: RFID Malware Demystified

Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2006 [Video] Presentations from the security conference

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) malware, first introduced in my paper 'Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?', has raised a great deal of controversy since it was first presented at the IEEE PerCom conference on March 15, 2006. The subject received an avalanche of (often overzealous) press coverage, which triggered a flurry of both positive and negative reactions from the RFID industry and consumers. Happily, once people started seriously thinking about RFID security issues, the ensuing discussion raised a heap of new research questions. This presentation will serve as a forum to address some of these recent comments and questions first-hand; I will start by explaining the fundamental concepts behind RFID malware, and then offer some qualifications and clarifications, separating out "the facts vs. the myth" regarding the real-world implications. Melanie Rieback is a Ph.D. student in Computer Systems at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where she is supervised by Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. Melanie's research concerns the security and privacy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and she leads multidisciplinary research teams on RFID privacy management (RFID Guardian) and RFID security (RFID Malware) projects. Melanie's recent work on RFID Malware has attracted worldwide attention, appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, UPI, de Volkskrant, Computable, Computerworld, Computer Weekly, CNN, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and many other print, broadcast, and online news outlets. Melanie has also served as an invited expert for RFID discussions involving both the American and Dutch governments. In a past life, Melanie also worked on the Human Genome Project at the MIT Center for Genome Research/Whitehead Institute. She was part of the public genome sequencing consortium, and is listed as a coauthor on the seminal paper 'Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome', which appeared in the journal Nature."