(1) Video surveillance is used everywhere on police cars, traffic lights, etc. It's cheap, practical and can work at (2) Tires already have serial numbers. (TIN). I don't know if they track these numbers when tired are installed or not, but if they do, then RFID just makes the job faster. If that is your concern, pay cash for tires and install them yourself in your garage.
(3) RFID would be REALLY hard to do as you are driving down the road. It takes time to power up the RFID tag, send it a message, and get a response. I found a reference of 300 milliseconds for a reading. That's IF you are two inches away, and the object is NOT moving. If the tag is at the edge of the tire (as the picture implies) - where are you going to put the reader so that it can get within 2 inches of the tire? And how can it read the tag at 40 miles an hour, when the tag is spinning around the edge of the tire? If the sensor is embedded in the road, you have to drive directly OVER it, and the tag has to be at the bottom of the tire, and the car has to be driving very very slow. That's assuming the sensor and the power cable will survive being embedded in asphalt. A sensor near the edge of the road would be too far away to get a reading,
If someone can get within 2 inches of your tires while you are driving 40 miles an hour, you have other things to worry about.
> That's IF you are two inches away, and the object is NOT moving. If the tag is at the edge of the tire (as the picture implies) - where are you going to put the reader so that it can get within 2 inches of the tire?
900Mhz RFID tags can be read from over 30ft away. Can't find a video but someone @ defcon was able to get a read from 250ft away using a yagi antenna & power way over the FCC limits.
Yes, but there's a big difference between a one-time demo under ideal conditions, and something that can be mass-produced and used daily. In the case of tires, (1) the car is likely moving, (2) the tires are spinning at the same time, (3) there are 4 tires (at least - not to mention shoes, credit cards, etc.) and all RFID tags of the same frequency will respond to the reader at the same time, making it very difficult to capture the ID of a single tag. There is no collision avoidance in the transmission.
Yes, I'm sure some special technology can be developed that can track and follow a single car as it travels down a road, and isolate the tags, but the police already use ANPR to identify amber alerts, stolen vehicles, unpaid fines, etc. ANPR systems cost under $200, and some (according to Wikipedia) will work even if the car is traveling at 120 MPH.
It makes no sense to attempt to use RFID for tracking cars.
RFID tags are used to track runner progress during road races. Runners wear a paper bib usually on the front of their shirt which has an RFID tag on its back side. The runners will cross over timing mats at least at the start and finish (sometimes the RFID sensors are overhead, but in either case are several feet from the tag). This is used to fairly reliably track thousands of runners moving at 5-12 mph (more or less). I realize that's a far cry from a car moving tens of mph, but modern RFID tech works better than you are claiming.
Point is, one can still read those tags in 40 mph, by the side of the road or further away. All that is needed is creating the device to the task, instead of getting one pre-made from Alibaba. Yes, that'd be a hell of a device (digital post-processing of signal, directional antenna, powerful transmitter), still pretty much doable and not even hard to hide.
As they say at the thread. Pretty much everything has an rfid tag nowadays. Each tag alone is not enough to track a person, but one does not need many of them for an individual signature - 3, maybe 4. Maybe we should add portable high power microwave transmitters to our usual set of home supplies.
How the hell is that forum sliding? Forum sliding is where you post things unrelated to a topic on a bunch of fake accounts to get it off the front page of a forum, not saying "this isn't really a big deal."
Why not? At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist somewhere, stringing together a Raspberry Pi-class computer and a RFID reader to replace the mobile phone remote detonator in an IED doesn't make it any less improvised.
But it's still made of COTS parts and assembled by an individual, as opposed to dedicated hardware being used by a weapons manufacturer.
I'm probably on the lists already, so I'll just point out that turning an IED into an RFID-scanning "smart IED" seems to require only a somewhat competent electrical engineering undergrad, a laptop, and less than $10 worth in parts. The reason they aren't widely used is probably because there are better methods than playing with RFIDs.
I think it's simply because vast majority of people are pretty OK and don't feel like killing others or blowing things up. No doubt there will be some attempts somewhere at some point, but generally - if people were to be eager to make drone-bombs, they'd probably be using RC car bombs before, or simply shooting at others more often. It seems however that in all but the most chaotic places, people generally stick to more peaceful ways of voicing their concerns or disagreements.
Someone has done a proof-of concept for this at a Russian press conference, by which I mean that they buzzed the VIP table with a drone carrying a large-ish dildo (which I assume weighed about as much as a small explosive payload).
I'm surprised that no one has done it with regular RC planes or mortars. It's not like new technology is necessary for this.
Heck, why not just throw the bomb in a trash can, or hide it under a car in a parking lot, etc. It's not like bomb placement is the difficult part of terrorism.
My thought is that this is simply a matter of time (and initiative and opportunity).
High-level targets, say, top leadership of G8 nations, would likely be difficult. But attacking key field leadership, business executives, or heads of state of smaller nations is well within current capability.
A drone buzzed Angela Merkel a couple of years ago (video on YouTube), and a Russian leader more recently.
My sense is that a small directed weapon (effectively: gun) would be more effective, though an explosive charge and shrapnel could certainly be utilised.
The technological advantage the US and other advanced nations have in drone technology is quite likely to be short-lived. Especially if your interest is, say, 1-5km range, rather than 100-500km.
Some time ago Secret Service posted a work order[0] for software that could detect (among other things) "sarcasm and false positives" in social media content, so someone is most likely working on it.
I'd love to see statistics on the failure rate of say, a traditional remote operated claymore VS an "improvised explosive device". I suspect we're reaching a point where the line is getting blurry, with the main distinction being that most world governments have been good about restricting access to explosive precursors and monitoring purchases so IEDs have a higher failure rate since they do not generally have military grade explosives, military grade electronics, or access to the vast body of knowledge on how to blow shit up that most armies have.
You might only have access when the vehicle is moving on the road.
For instance, you might plant a roadside reader/logger, and have an observer away from the road watching. The observer notes the time whenever a military vehicle goes by.
After you've logged a few military vehicles, you retrieve the logs, match them up to the observer's time stamps, and now you've got a list of targets for your roadside RFID based bomb.
Knowing the target RFID doesn't mean proximate access.
You might, say, attack a hardened, highly secured, professionally maintained electronic data system. Say the integrated business operations system of a large nationwide tyres-service company. Pull off the RFID and owner data.
Apply information as, where, and when desired.
And this is why, boys and girls, data are liability.
Yup, and when this came out I took my RFID reader kit out and read the tags on my tires. And yes they were all unique.
Some folks at UC Berkeley built an RFID reading device you could put by the side of a (one lane) road (like an on-ramp) and read the tires from it. From a traffic analysis standpoint it would be much more effective than those hoses they put across the road to measure cars going by.
At the point we reach Tools Offering Aggregated Surveillance Things (TOAST), you'll be able to figure out where a tire (and the car it was attached to) was 24/7
> Some folks at UC Berkeley built an RFID reading device you could put by the side of a (one lane) road (like an on-ramp) and read the tires from it. From a traffic analysis standpoint it would be much more effective than those hoses they put across the road to measure cars going by.
Why would that be much more effective? Do the hoses have significant count errors, or is it that the RFID system will let them tell what make/model of tire went by and so infer data such as vehicle type that they do not get from the hose system?
The hose system tells you total traffic but unless you have two of them you don't know what direction the cars are going. Also it can't tell how cars "flow" so where cars enter the measured area and where they exit. Traffic planners need flow to understand if "express" lanes would help for example.
I believe it is the inevitable outcome of the "Internet of Things" meets the "identification of things". Today a number of police departments have red light cameras the give no tickets. So you might wonder why they are still there. As it turns out they do an excellent job of watching your license plate go through an intersection and recording that on a server. Add that to police cars with their own license plate readers and GPS and you end up with a cloud of data points, with time and GPS information for places in a city where a license plate has appeared.
That provides a very valuable database for law enforcement, if you know a car was used during a robbery, poof you know where that car as been, so you are one up on the robbers. Even if the license plate was stolen or the car stolen, you have it from the point the plate was stolen to the present. The ALCU has been trying to get statements about how long this data is kept and how it is accessed.
Today you can recognize faces with machines better than you can with humans. A camera can take pictures and store the face data with no other personally identifiable information, and yet when you suspect someone of something you plug in their face data and "poof" you get all the cameras that have seen them and when. Recent laws about trying to protect this sort of abuse not withstanding. [3]
IMSI catchers and simply Wifi MAC address catchers for the purposes of advertising (or surveillance)[4] can provide GPS + Time + identifiable number logs.
Storage is cheap, 32 bit CPU chips are free, HD cameras are cheap, and software radios can build white-space mesh networks on demand. When you lay a grid of these passive technologies around town, it will become the most powerful tool humans have ever invented for keeping track of, or locating, other humans of interest.
The fun part is that private citzens can play too, anyone can put together a fleet of cameras recognizing faces and license plates with a Raspberry Pi 2. And if you have a HackRF One you can pick up GSM bands and WiFi bands to note the phones, tablets, laptops nearby. Call it $400/unit, $40,000 for 100 units (two at every intersection would cover an area of 7 square blocks. Not something you would do on a lark but certainly within reach of someone who could profit from the information.
The tracking potential is very low for tire RFID tags because every tire as well as every car has some sort of visual identification. However, the main advantage I see is that you can very easily find out who dumps used tires in a river or in the woods.
An RFID is just a unique serial number no real different to a barcode or a written serial no, just it can be read easier (and generally matched to a UID on a maintenance database or suchlike) Yes the manufacturer can also store encrypted data on one but I honestly cannot figure out how an external party could abuse this system.
It really doesn't take very much creativity to abuse this system. How about a database of who bought each tire cross referenced to a monitoring strip in the road to see who is going where? How about that monitoring strip being in the entrance to every fast food joint, restaurant, store, mall, etc - now you can track drivers just like we track browsers. Since we have your name, we can cross reference your driving and browsing history.
This is exactly what I was thinking. As much as these RFIDs seem like a privacy issue, a license plate is already there and in many ways a more accessible way to track a vehicle.
That is not the same. Rfid tracking / filtering is much easier and more precise than video. There is no need for computer vision or any kind of expensive computing. Also it is far easier to abuse by evil civilians. Consider the overhead of installing a high enough quality video camera on a public road for a criminal compared to an Rfid reader.
While the parent comment was definitely lacking in creativity, a unique RFID in each tire isn't terribly different from a unique barcode on each tire. I'd honestly be surprised if most products I own didn't have one of those.
> I'd honestly be surprised if most products I own didn't have one of those.
A barcode or an RFID tag? The only reason most of your products don't have an RFID tag is that barcodes are much cheaper, and the entire logistics chain - from manufacturing to retail - is already pretty well optimized around those. There is not much value to gain. About the only use for passive radio tags I've seen widely deployed is theft prevention, and half of the times the tags are removed at the counter and later reused.
A barcode. I mean that RFIDs are functionally very similar for purposes of maintaining a database to something (barcodes) that is already very likely on most consumer goods.
Nitpick: Barcodes are not (generally) unique to a specific item, just a specific SKU. Whereas RFID chips are item-specifc, so there is a difference. In other words, barcodes won't allow one to differentiate between 2 identical bags of chips, but an RFID tag will allow one to differentiate between 2 identical tires.
When you're talking supply chain, be advised that there are more symbologies and more uses of them than the UPC or EAN codes used at retail checkstands. Most companies do use a unique or semi-unique number to identify a unit as it's moving through their processes. They also barcode the model number as well.
Barcode would absolutely allow you to differentiate between any two cell phones, or cars, or computers.
Indeed. Hell, any somewhat complicated product, like an electronic device, usually has several barcodes inside it, as they're also widely used in manufacturing - not just for automating things, but mostly for process control. A person who put the motherboard inside your computer most likely had to scan several barcodes at his station in order to report that those-and-those parts have been connected and passed forward.
(Source: I worked on a software that reads those barcodes and controls the manufacturing process.)
My reading is that Tirerack registers the DOT Tire Identification Numbers with the tire manufacturers. Not with "the government". It's the manufacturer who is liable for damages from defective tires. So it's the manufacturer who needs this information.
Ah, I see. It still results in the creation of a direct mapping from week/year of manufacture to name and address, which wouldn't be difficult for a government to obtain and use. If the tire RFID contains a serial number, then a few geographic correlations would be enough to assign that serial to a specific person.
Maybe I'm naive, but this doesn't seem a very big deal in today's world. So this would theoretically - if you have enough time and power to equip all intersections with hidden RFID readers mounted below the road - allow you to collect a sort of poor-man's location history of cars. However, it's restricted to the things that happen in the area you bugged, it doesn't tell you anything about who is driving the car and if all routes are done by the same person and it captures nothing that takes place outside the car.
Compare that to the almost complete, 100% personalized location history you get when you manage to get your "flashlight" app installed on an android phone...
I suspect these are for inventory and recall tracking. While they could be co-opted for more nefarious purposes it makes sense from a manufacturing perspective.
I can't wait to see videos of people trying to put their tires into microwave ovens to get rid of RFID tags, like what Germans are doing with their IDs :-D
I suspect passing a degaussing coil over the tire for a while will kill the tags. If that doesn't work, it's really easy to make an HERF gun.
// Safety Warning - Actually building an HERF gun can be extremely dangerous, and should only be attempted by people familiar with both high-voltage safety and radio safety. Seriously, RF burns can be really nasty. //
I can't say I like the idea of being tracked, but your vehicle already has at least one ID tag that is easier to read at range - the registration plate. Coupled with other identifying tag you are likely to be carrying (e.g. WiFi MAC addresses - I know at least one bank in the UK uses this to measure branch visit numbers), this doesn't seem like a big deal (from a privacy standpoint at least).
Out of interest I just checked both my cars bridgestone and toyo brands bought in NZ in 2014 with my 125Khz and a 13.7Mhz (mifare) reader and found nothing, Could be UHF RFID but I don't have a reader for one of those.
I guess if the state is out to get you that bad you could move to NZ :-)
This seems like a great way to optimize parking spot usage. Could RFID readers be used to know if a parking spot had tires in it? Could this be deployed attached to parking meters or in parking garages cheaply? If not how much cheaper do the readers have to get?
