More and more people are thinking about payments being done with RFIDs. Here's another article on it:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/12/tech/printable588346.shtml
I feel another repeat of the smart card money story coming on... RFIDs fall in the "cool and visible" category, not the "solves many problems" category. Still, there's nothing like paying for stuff that people can hold.
RFIDs amount to numbers that can't be easily copied. To do that, they have to be physical, and the production process is very expensive at the level of one RFID, but cheap at the level of many RFIDs.
In any physical payments situation, this could make it possible to easily identify a particular person's account or a paper note purporting to be worth a dollar [1]
But, let's get relativistic here: the advantage over existing techniques is strictly marginal. We can already print difficult-to-forge paper notes, check out the recent Euros as one not-so-leading example. And, credit cards are difficult to copy until one gets access to a database of them [2].
In practice, RFIDs may make a marginal difference to these characteristics. But, make no mistake - the real differences will come in the overall architecture that employs these techniques.
RFIDs will be sugar-coated journo-food, an important role in themselves for establishing the momentum for adoption, but not as critical to the security as people would like.
Think of RFIDs as a repeat of the smart card money story [3]. Anybody who's too focused on the tech will fail. Look for systems to have real architectures behind them.
iang
[1] Retail is the obvious one, but not the most useful. In fact, these devices have more likelihood of making headway in the transport sector - driver-based payments for truckers, petrol, tolls purchases.
[2] If you want to stop credit cards being copied, stop making databases of them!
[3] Next year will be the year of the smartcard, I promise!
Posted by iang at December 14, 2003 01:20 PM | TrackBack