There’s always got to be some joker out there to remind us that technology can be both friend and foe, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags in today’s marketplace. Mark Ward of BBC News writes:

Computer viruses could be about to take a giant leap and start spreading via smart barcodes, warn experts.

Security researchers have infected a Radio Frequency ID tag with a computer virus to show how the technology is vulnerable to malicious hackers.

The researchers warn that RFID tags could help mount many different types of attacks on computer systems.

Makers of radio tag systems were urged by the group to introduce safeguards to guard against RFID-borne bugs.

“This is intended as a wake-up call,” said Andrew Tanenbaum, one of the researchers in the computer science department at Amsterdam’s Free University that did the work revealing the weaknesses on smart tags.

“We ask the RFID industry to design systems that are secure,” he said.

RFID tags are essentially smart barcodes that replace the familiar lines with a small amount of computer memory, a tiny processing unit and a radio. Information is downloaded into the tag and read off it via radio.

Many large companies are keen to use the RFID tags because they will help keep track of the goods they are shipping from warehouses out to stores or regional offices. Currently RFID tags are relatively expensive so most are used to log what is in boxes of goods rather than to label individual items.

However, many expect the smart tags to become ubiquitous as the price of making the devices falls…