Langsam kommt die Szene in Schwung
Die Regierung der Niederlande warnte jetzt vor einem Einbruch in die RFID-Karten, mit denen Berechtigte in speziell gesicherte Gebäude kommen können. Das gilt vor allem für Verwaltungs- und Regierungsgebäude, aber auch für Wirtschaftsunternehmen und Banken im ganzen Land. Außerdem ist etwa 1 Million der Schlüsselkarten international verstreut.
Wie die niederländische Zeitschrift Web Wereld berichtete, sind die Karten betroffen, die auf dem weithin verwendeten Chip MiFare Classic von der Firma NXP beruhen.
Die Regierung will – in ihrem Zuständigkeitsbereich – Maßnahmen zur zusätzlichen Absicherung treffen und die Betroffenen aufklären. Innenministerin Guusje ter Horst unterrichtete in einem Schreiben an das Parlament von den Unstimmigkeiten. Sie gehen auf Versuche der beiden Forscher Karsten Nohl und Henryk Plötz zurück, hieß es.
Sie hatten bereits im Dezember vergangenen Jahres gezeigt, wie einfach die Schaltkreise des Chips zu hacken seien. Bart Jacobs von der Universität Nijmegen bestätigte kürzlich den Hack als machbar. Etwa 2 Millionen Gebäude allein in den Niederlanden stehen damit Hackern offen, so der Security- und IT-Professor. Der Hack ermöglicht den Nachbau von Chips, so genannten Klonen, in beliebiger Anzahl. Großabnehmer seien informiert worden. Sie sollen nach dem Willen von ter Horst Gelegenheit erhalten, ihren Kunden die Gefahr mitzuteilen und ihnen Alternativen anzubieten. Das niederländische Transportwesen ist einer dieser Großabnehmer.
Weiter so
RFID chips are everywhere - companies and labs use them as access keys, Prius owners use them to start their cars, and retail giants like Wal-Mart have deployed them as inventory tracking devices. Drug manufacturers like Pfizer rely on chips to track pharmaceuticals. The tags are also about to get a lot more personal: Next-gen US passports and credit cards will contain RFIDs, and the medical industry is exploring the use of implantable chips to manage patients. According to the RFID market analysis firm IDTechEx, the push for digital inventory tracking and personal ID systems will expand the current annual market for RFIDs from $2.7 billion to as much as $26 billion by 2016.
RFID technology dates back to World War II, when the British put radio transponders in Allied aircraft to help early radar system crews detect good guys from bad guys. The first chips were developed in research labs in the 1960s, and by the next decade the US government was using tags to electronically authorize trucks coming into Los Alamos National Laboratory and other secure facilities. Commercialized chips became widely available in the '80s, and RFID tags were being used to track difficult-to-manage property like farm animals and railroad cars. But over the last few years, the market for RFIDs has exploded, driven by advances in computer databases and declining chip prices. Now dozens of companies, from Motorola to Philips to Texas Instruments, manufacture the chips.
The tags work by broadcasting a few bits of information to specialized electronic readers. Most commercial RFID chips are passive emitters, which means they have no onboard battery: They send a signal only when a reader powers them with a squirt of electrons. Once juiced, these chips broadcast their signal indiscriminately within a certain range, usually a few inches to a few feet. Active emitter chips with internal power can send signals hundreds of feet; these are used in the automatic toll-paying devices (with names like FasTrak and E-ZPass) that sit on car dashboards, pinging tollgates as autos whiz through.
For protection, RFID signals can be encrypted. The chips that will go into US passports, for example, will likely be coded to make it difficult for unauthorized readers to retrieve their onboard information (which will include a person's name, age, nationality, and photo). But most commercial RFID tags don't include security, which is expensive: A typical passive RFID chip costs about a quarter, whereas one with encryption capabilities runs about $5. It's just not cost-effective for your average office building to invest in secure chips.
This leaves most RFIDs vulnerable to cloning or - if the chip has a writable memory area, as many do - data tampering. Chips that track product shipments or expensive equipment, for example, often contain pricing and item information. These writable areas can be locked, but often they aren't, because the companies using RFIDs don't know how the chips work or because the data fields need to be updated frequently. Either way, these chips are open to hacking.
"The world of RFID is like the Internet in its early stages," says Ari Juels, research manager at the high tech security firm RSA Labs. "Nobody thought about building security features into the Internet in advance, and now we're paying for it in viruses and other attacks. We're likely to see the same thing with RFIDs."
David Molnar is a soft-spoken computer science graduate student who studies commercial uses for RFIDs at UC Berkeley. I meet him in a quiet branch of the Oakland Public Library, which, like many modern libraries, tracks most of its inventory with RFID tags glued inside the covers of its books. These tags, made by Libramation, contain several writable memory "pages" that store the books' barcodes and loan status.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html
http://www.wired.com/
Eine der größten RFID Firmen
http://www.nxp.com/country/germany/
Umsatz 2007)*: $ 6,32 Milliarden