Sooner or later the U.S. will catch up the RFID technology just like in Asia where RFID has been used widely in various places. For example, in Japan RFID chip is installed in the cell phone so that people can use their cell phone to purchase food or beverage in their vending machines. Also in Hong Kong, people started using Octopus card 20 years ago to pay for all means of public transporation such as the train, MTR, bus etc. U.S. companies have only considered RFID in the supply chain to keep track of inventory in all stages. But ROI is yet the big question. What I envision in the future is that we can use our cell phone to pay for purchases just like a credit card. Also we'll use the cell phone to transmit other secured personal data so that would eliminate having to carry many credit cards and IDs. OF course we need to think about how to protect privacy and security.
Many of the 'secure' RFID systems were specifically designed to be short range, but with the use of special antennas, that has been 'cracked'.
Also there are 'addon' fronts, basically plastic faces that fit over the 'real' scanner and feed the signals into slave devices for analysis.
The bottom line is that RFID as it stands , just is not secure enough to be trusted handling a significant volume of financial transactions.
If you dig about many of the 'secure' token systems have already been cracked, but they have been/are being prevented from publishing results via a number of high profile 'gag' orders.
Not that it is going to make the products any more secure since the cracks are well publicized, but it does ensure that less well informed customers keep buying the equipment.
It is yet another exanmple of' Security via abscurity' having fallen apart, where a manufacturer or group consider themselves so smart as to be able to prevent the combined mentality of several thousand people, just be blocking publication of some data.
Unfortunately as has been shown so many times in the past , it just does not work, and still they do it.
yes that is why i suggested one high value component that gets re-used in following sub-assemblies.
The rfid tag used for security was a thought in the moment to add one more layer tot he re-use idea.
It was not given a lot of thought.
But i did not intend for it to be used by itself but as a 2nd layer of authentication.
Hardcore you brought up some good points about open to anybody sniffing.
But this is as easy as it sounds.
also the power could be controlled to only work a few inches from the point of purchase just as in near field. The exitation source would be very low power as would the rfid reflection. The far field mixing of both would make it very difficult to intercept this signal/
But I do agree with you that without careful implementation this could be an issue if this was the only authentication messure.
it at a minimum could be used to cross-correlate the token, credit payment and cell phone user together.
The main issue in using RFID tags for security , is that it is *not* secure ,So any product that relied on RFID as the basis for secure payment would be fairly well 'Stuffed' before it even left the factory.
As a result if you designed it into the 'silicon' of the product it would be a 'waste', but there are still patents on the idea.
Unfortunately the RFID tags are far too easy to clone. Since there is not a central agency issuing security keys, also for correct validation there would be a need for an extended two way secured computational communication channel.
Currently i suspect the computational processing power of an RFID tag is limited, and there is the issue that RF is usually always 'open' to anyone wanting to 'sniff' the conversation.
I suspect the main reason RFID has not taken off in a big way in manufacturing, is that fact that many products are sub-assemblies, and it just does not make sense yet!!
Consider that if you decided to implement RFID in a production facility, at what point do you do it? , size or cost of the component?
In the case of an IPhone, do you: RFID the case+the Battery+the PCB+the LCD, the product box+the shipping lot+ the pallet ?
Then you get into discussions of subcontractors adding in RFID tags to the source materials, Tape & reel, plastic shipments, metal parts.
Even at $0.10US each it is already adding >Dollar to the material costs at various stages.
I hadn't thought about one component acting as the tag for the entire end-product. That would certainly reduce costs. There are a lot of logistics issues--such as last-minute component swaps--but the concept makes sense. Thanks for pointing that out, Efficiency
how far down in granularity you go affects the cost of using RFID tags but not so much the readers as they get reussed no matter what the quantity of RFID tags go by it.
since it is mostly humanless intervention the labor should not go up but down.
The only way it could go up is in using and understanding the info flow to optimize performance of the system.
At some point diminishing returns law starts to apply.
As an example you could put a RFID tag on the ARM processor in an Aplle iphone track it before and after it is put on a PCB and then use it to track the PCB assembly to the fianl assembly. then reuse it again for final assembly.
Then re-used during shipping transit thru to the store.
then re-used by the consumer as another security feature to authenticate phone and owner to by a coke at the vending machineor down load some music from a kiosk at the airport...
OK - But I guess I'm making the assumption that tagging is changing from a pallet level to a production unit level....which would provide significant benefits analyzing movement through the distribution chain to the comsumer, but increase the quantity of tages used and the amount of data being tracked.
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Join EBN contributor Jennifer Baljko on Thursday August 23, 2012, at 11:00 a.m. EST for a live chat on how electronic manufacturers in Thailand have shored up their supply chain to reduce the impact of future natural disasters.
Peter Drucker famously said "Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window." Yet in the razor's-edge world of electronics—with a lean supply chain and just-in-time demands—the need to know the future is vital.
While no one really can accurately predict the future, we can take guidance from another Drucker saying which is the best way to predict the future is to create it.
You've heard the saying "the No. 1 supply chain risk is your people." That hasn't always been the case. But today's complex global supply chain requires a new type of multitalented employee. It's one who understands, finance, marketing, economics, is savvy with technology, graceful with relationships and can think analytically.
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