Personal Firewall for everyday life
Nowadays more and more devices are getting RFID tagged. If you have a “badge reader” at work to get into a door, or to log into your computer then you carry one along with you all day. They are now in car keys, passports, and credit cards (FastPay, FastPass, etc).
But they have a dirty little secret. Well, not so secret, but here it is: they can be read by bad guys. And those bad guys don’t have to be within a few inches of you, like the manufacturers would like you to believe.
Given that fact makes a gadget like The Guardian here a nifty idea. The article below explains it better, but basically this doodad will block random attempts by others to read the tags you are carrying around, and gives you the power to decide when your tags will and will not respond to read attempts.
From BoingBoing:
The RFID Guardian project has released the hardware and software schematics for the latest version of its personal RFID firewall. The RFID Guardian is a device that detects all the RFID tags on your person (passport, transit pass, bank-card, toll-card, car keys, etc), and interdicts them so that they can’t answer queries anymore. The Guardian can clone all of these tags, and emit their signal on demand, but unlike a dumb tag, the Guardian only emits when you tell it to, and gives you a central way to set and enforce policy about when you will be identified and by whom.
The new version is completely open, and the relaunched RFID Guardian site includes a wiki, source code repository and bug-tracker. Link (Thanks, Melanie!)
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