RFID Virus

InfoSecDaily has a story from Freedom To Tinker telling about paper that describes “how RFID tags might be used to propagate computer viruses”:

Suppose that some subset of the world’s RFID readers had an input-processing bug of this general type, so that whenever one of these readers scanned an RFID tag containing diabolically constructed input, the reader would be hijacked and would execute some command contained in that input. If this were the case, an RFID-carried virus would be possible.

A virus attack might start with a single RFID tag carrying evil data. When a vulnerable reader scanned that tag, the reader’s bug would be triggered, causing the reader to execute a command specified by that tag. The command would reconfigure the reader to make it write copies of the evil data onto tags that it saw in the future. This would spread the evil data onto more tags. When any of those tags came in contact with a vulnerable reader, that reader would be infected, turning it into a factory for making more infected tags. The infection would spread from readers to new tags, and from tags to new readers. Before long many tags and readers would be infected.