The Lazarus Effect: Resurrecting Killed RFID Tags

Authors

Christopher Bolan, Edith Cowan University

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publisher

School of Computer and Information Science, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia

Comments

4th Australian Information Security Management Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, 5th December, 2006

Abstract

Several RFID Standards allow RFID Tags to be ‘killed’ using a specialised command code. ‘Killed’ RFID Tags should be irrevocably deactivated. In actuality, when a valid kill command is sent to a tag four sections of the tags management data are zeroed causing the tag to enter a ‘fault state’ and thus be ignored by RFID readers. Through the reinitialisation of these four sections to valid values it was discovered that a tag could be resurrected and function normally.

DOI

10.4225/75/57b655b034765