London’s Oyster RFID card to become a full cashless payment system
Apparently, Transport For London are planning ‘e-money’ trials based on their remotely-readable Oyster RFID cards.
Combine that with Kevin Mahaffey of Flexilis’ talk at Black Hat last year, where he demonstrated apparatus to extend RFID read range from 4-6 inches to approximately 50 feet, and things could get messy. ;)
The slides for that talk are available here (PDF); slide 20 specifically mentions the Hong Kong “Octopus” cashless-payment card.
Tags: flexilis, kevin-mahaffey, london, oyster, rfid
Antoin O Lachtnain said,
May 4, 2006 @ 6:55 pm
This was always the plan for the Oyster card. It’s a smart card though, quite a bit different from passive RFID. There is a layer of cryptographic security that you don’t have on a plain old RFID. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but it’s not that bad. At the end of the day, you have to match the security to the application. And Kevin Mahaffey does seem to allow that Oyster has ‘adequate’ security. Obviously more security would be better.