Re: Default Passwords for World Wide Packets/Lightning Edge Equipment

[Steven Bellovin <smb () cs columbia edu>]

On Jan 13, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Barry Shein wrote:

> There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about RFID tags. I'm hardly
> an expert but I do know this much:
>
> RFID tags are generic, you don't put data into them unique to your
> application.
Part of the original (or at least early) context for this thread was recovery of default passwords.  If the password is 
F(ser#), it's only learnable if you know both F() and ser#.  The vendor knows F() -- who knows ser#?  If it's in an 
RFID tag, or is DBlookup(tag#,vendor_db), being able to read this admittedly-arbitrary number may indeed be a threat.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb