RFID tags vulnerable to viruses, study says
Attacks could soon come in the form of a SQL injection or a buffer overflow attack
News Story by Jeremy Kirk
MARCH 15, 2006

(IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Three computer science researchers are warning that viruses embedded in radio tags used to identify and track goods are right around the corner, a danger that so far has been overlooked by the industry's high interest in the technology.

No viruses targeting radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have been released live yet, according to the researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. But RFID tags have several characteristics that could be engineered to exploit vulnerabilities in middleware and back-end databases, they wrote in a paper presented today at a conference in Pisa, Italy
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"RFID malware is a Pandora's box that has been gathering dust in the corner of our 'smart' warehouses and home," the paper stated.

The attacks can come in the form of a SQL injection or a buffer overflow attack even though the tags themselves may only store a small bit of information, the paper said. For demonstration purposes, the researchers created a proof-of-concept, self-replicating RFID virus. Story