D7.7: RFID, Profiling, and AmI

Title: SECURITY RISKS FOR RFID-ENABLED PROFILING

Sabine Delaitre (IPTS) 

Marie thinks about her friend Claire who is always fast in adopting new electronic gadgets such as a smart blouse. Marie likes it. It seems really practical. Marie asks Claire whether she may borrow it. 

Some days after that, Claire is working at home when burglars break into her apartment. The burglars are surprised to find Claire at home. In the ensuing confrontation, Claire is punched in the face. The burglars get away with only her Personal Wrist Communicator (PWC), her wallet and some jewels that were lying on the table, but the experience of getting robbed will haunt Claire for a much longer time. Moreover, she will now have to train her new PWC from scratch because she did not want to store her profile(s) online, and because the burglars destroyed her home computer which Claire used to back up her PWC.  

The burglary and mugging occurred because of an unlucky coincidence of circumstances, i.e. that Marie was wearing Claire’s blouse when she went to the park where the criminals happened to be operating. As she was passing by, the gang “read” the RFID tag* embedded in the blouse. As a result, the gang found out (following the brand of the blouse and the publicly available product codes) that the blouse had been sold at a certain shop. The gang hacked the client database of that specific shop to discover Claire’s profile (a well-off woman living alone in the richer part of the city) (Knospe, Pohl, 2004). On the assumption that Claire was wearing the blouse, the criminals decided to break into the apartment and to steal whatever luxury goods they could find. 

The whole story was uncovered two weeks later when a technician was checking the systems of the shop and found suspicious entries in the systems’ log files. He uncovered the hacking and was able to follow up the way the gang broke into the system. He informed the police and made and official report. Investigations are still in progress. Who will carry Marie’s costs in the end is a matter of debate between her and the shop’s insurance company.