Sometimes high tech personal identification is “too smart by half”. The New York Times reports on how easy it is to hack no-swipe ( RFID ) credit cards and retrieve the personal identification information that is encoded on the cards.<\/p>\n
From the article —<\/p>\n
Tom Heydt-Benjamin tapped an envelope against a black plastic box connected to his computer. Within moments, the screen showed a garbled string of characters that included this: fu\/kevine, along with some numbers.<\/p>\n
Mr. Heydt-Benjamin then ripped open the envelope. Inside was a credit card, fresh from the issuing bank. The card bore the name of Kevin E. Fu, a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was standing nearby. The card number and expiration date matched those numbers on the screen.<\/p>\n
The demonstration revealed potential security and privacy holes in a new generation of credit cards \u2014 cards whose data is relayed by radio waves without need of a signature or physical swiping through a machine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n