RFid Blog

With a view to bring faster modes of transportation by controlling the severe traffic and improving parking conditions, the Korean government has started up an RFID-based rationing program which limits when owners can drive their vehicles.

Two leading RFID players, SkyeTek and Onnitech have joined hands for the program. They have supplied uWiz-400, an RFID reader of Onnitech to South Korean government. The RFID reader would be integrated with wireless network connectivity to assist the government personnel to determine whether automobiles comply with the rationing schedule.

Explaining Korea as a leader in its implementation of wireless technology in daily life, Rob Balgley, CEO of SkyeTek said,

The Korean government’s use of RFID to load balance commuters between automobiles and mass transit will reduce air pollution, time spent commuting, and expenditures on road / parking infrastructure. This use case is one of the many practical and powerful applications of RFID where a complex, labor intensive process is greatly automated and simplified.

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It seems that RFID passports have not come up to the standards. Few months back, the researchers hacked American RFID passports. Now, Britain is also facing same kind of problem with its RFID-enabled passports.

As known earlier, the UK government has issued nearly three million passports carrying RFID tags to check the terrorist activities and fraudsters. However, the Guardian newspaper exposed flaws in the RFID passports.

The newspaper claims that the Britons RFID passports are very easy to read and copy despite strong crypto algorithm to protect biometric data in the passport. The Guardian reporter using a device could read view and copy the information from several of the new passports.

Phil Booth of NO2ID who helped the Guardian in the investigation says,

This is simply not supposed to happen. This could provide a bonanza for counterfeiters because drawing the information from the chip, complete with the digital signature it contains, could result in a passport being passed off as the real article. You could make a perfect clone of the passport.

Look at the above picture. You would find an RFID tag embedded at the bottom of the bottle. Reason: It would not affect readability of the tag.

In many cases, the placement of a tag determines its efficiency. So far as individual item level tagging is concerned, the placement of tags assumes greater significant. Suppose, individual items are packed very narrowly to each other, then there is a problem. The transmission of one tag may impede with another. It’s clear that wrong positioning on packages can also obstruct tag’s reading capacity.

Realizing these factors, Ohio-based Owens-Illinois’s (O-I) healthcare division has developed plastic pharmaceuticals bottle with an RFID inlay embedded directly into the bottom of the container. By doing so, the drug providers can enhance the tag’s reading ability.

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Just think of a cell phone, which can be used as a car key, concert ticket and credit card. The consumers all over the world are very soon going to see such type of cell phones.

According to this source, the GSM Association (Global System for Mobile Communications) which provides mobile service 40 percent of world’s cell phone users has decided to bring RFID technology in the mobile phones. For this reason, it is developing an international standard on Near Field Communications (NFC).

Alex Sinclair, CTO of GSMA said,

NFC opens up a wide range of possibilities and we are committed to ensuring the mobile industry works together to realize its potential.

As of now, some 14 mobile network operators have clubbed together to develop business cases and user requirements for NFC. Then, a white paper would be submitted to NFC Forum and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) for consideration.

Hong Kong-based RC Group Ltd (RCG), a provider of biometric ID, security and RFID system has been awarded a series RFID project in South East Asia.

First, the Group has been selected to provide RFID-enabled security solutions for A1 Team Malaysia at the A1 Grand Prix, which has to be held on 26th of this month in Malaysia.

RCG will establish a sophisticated security system. It integrates FxAlex, the facial recognition software with RFID solution to build an intelligent surveillance system combined with access control.

The company has also won a five-year contract from Sunway Lagoon, one of Malaysia’s largest theme parks, to provide RFID ticketing and point of sales systems.

Besides these two projects, RCG will also provide its RFID systems to Malaysian hospital and pubic schools.

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Adoption of RFID technology is increasing at its fast. However, in terms of adoption, other countries are far behind USA and UK, even China.

In its recent study Hot Countries for RFID, the research firm IDTechEx says UK holds number two position in the world when it comes adoption of RFID technology. America tops the world.

There is a big gap between USA and UK in terms of implementation of this technology. The study claims USA has carried out 800 RFID implementations, while the UK undertook not more than 300 RFID projects.

However, China overtakes UK in terms of money spent of RFID projects and programs.

Peter Harrop, chairman of IDTechEx, says,

Considering China’s national identification card scheme is going to cost $6bn by 2008 and they have 900 million people to tag, the UK is talking about a $15bn scheme and planning for an over-spend for only 60 million people which is poor value for money. We could become the biggest spender or number two to the US because of spending money on RFID like drunken sailors.

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The RFID technology can be used to monitor and control temperature conditions in the distribution chain of perishable goods what we call cold chain. The RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas and Deloitte Consulting LLP has come up with this new application of RFID technology.

A university news release explains the researchers have found out that the temperature inside a shipping container can differ up to 35 percent from pallet to pallet, causing a potentially intolerable environment for the perishable goods.

Commenting on the applicability of RFID technology, Bill Hardgrave, Director of the University’s RFID Research Centre said,

This project showed that wireless and sensory technologies are a reliable, cost-effective way to investigate temperature and other conditions within a supposedly environmentally controlled trailer.

He continued,

The preliminary data from the experiment are already beginning to provide insight into a ‘real world’ environment that until now had been prohibitively expensive to track.

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I have already told you here about IBM’s association with Canadian company Marnlen Management Ltd for the development of clipped RFID tags, which would remove the privacy fears among the users.

See the video demonstration of Clipped tag.

It would prove you that these tags reduce read range by enabling the customers to scratch the majority of an RFID tag’s antenna.

Electronics giant Royal Philips said its Medical Systems Division has implemented an RFID-enabled Philips asset tracking solution.

The asset tracking solution uses WiFi technology from AeroScout Inc, Wireless Tags, a location engine and MobileView user interface.

The wireless tags can be put in any of the mobile assets. These tags would transmit data to the existing 802.11 wireless infrastructure of a healthcare unit. The location engine would feed the data and location of the assets can then be displayed on a report format or a map for any networked hospital user.

Tom Kirkland, Vice President of Phillips Medical Systems opines,

With the information that is gathered through the asset tracking solution, asset utilization, work flow efficiencies, and staff productivity can be improved.

He added,

Asset tracking allows users to maximize the resources they have and to make smarter decisions about what they need going forward. Visibility of location and awareness of building trend history over time means both staff satisfaction in the short term and staff efficiencies in the long term.

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The Smart Card Association (SCA) has come down heavily on the US researchers who reportedly said that a security flaw in the RFID contactless payment cards make it easier for the frauds to collect vital information of the cardholders.

A few months ago, the researchers from the University of Massachusetts, RSA Laboratories and Innealta have formed an RFID Consortium for Security and Privacy to find out the draw backs of RFID technology.

The group tested nearly 20 contactless cards and claimed that RFID cards are vulnerable to security attacks. A hacker can easily find out the names and other important information of the cardholder’s without approval. (See the demonstration.)

However, Smart Card Association defends the RFID technology by claiming the report submitted by the researcher is baseless. There is no indication that a criminal could complete a fraudulent contactless payment transaction in the real world.

In a statement the SCA said,

One reason is that the researchers conducted these tests in a lab setting using only contactless cards and readers and did not interact with the payment networks in any way. One cannot draw valid conclusions about the security of a payment network if you ignore the network.

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