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Forrester Report: RFID Not As Secure As Vendors Say

Written by Evan Schuman
September 20th, 2006
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RFID tags are secure for only a handful of very specific situations, according to a new report from Forrester Research. “RFID is not mature enough yet to protect your company secrets,” the report said. “This technology will inevitably bring changes to business processes, but adopters need to anticipate the potential threats that can arise with new changes and know the limitations of their RFID systems.”

Forrester says that risks include the lack of ability to see modified data on a RFID tag, passive tags lacking confidentiality protection and an attacker’s ability to send their own signals and block others.


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Kill All The Passwords

This article does mention, but does not give enough attention to, the fact that the attacks discussed are only feasible when the encrypted password file can be copied and subjected to an offline attack. The trick is to have authentication performed on a separate, much more strongly secured host - such as an Active Directory Domain Controller, or a Kerberos server, or a NIS+ server, or even using something as banal as an LDAP-over-SSL authentication dialog. In these environments, the odds of the "password file" being stolen and subjected to an offline attack go to near zero, and only online attacks may be carried out by the attacker. With sensible exponential backoff between failed password attempts, lockout after a modest number of failed attempts on a single account, and pattern detection, that minimum 7 character password is quite secure enough. Passwords aren't dead yet for security purposes, and they will be with us for a very long while to come for practical purposes. The trick is to employ them correctly. Read more...
The possibilities you describe are years away from being implemented at best, so for the moment passwords are an ugly reality. Luckily, password managers can easily manage hundreds of passwords of any length. The only thing a user needs to remember is the master password. It seems like an easier task to educate users on how to use password managers rather than implement complex security technology on a global basis. Read more...