Fergie's Tech Blog

Recipe of the Day: Frying Your Own RFID Tags!

Via RedState.

RFID tags in our livestock, in our pets, in our licenses, in passports, in food, in clothing and maybe someday in you. It is getting rather excessive. Fortunately there are a number of ways to kill RFID chips. See the Technical Documents section of the right hand sidebar for how to build your very own RFID bomb with which you can clear you home of unauthorized RFID chips. For the less technically inclined there is a simple device that most people already own which does a admirable job of frying RFID chips.

The way that passive RFID chips work is they pickup a radio signal from the wand using a large in-chip antenna. This energy is stored up over a short period to accumulate enough power to activate the chip and then send back its code number to the receiver.

If you can send out a strong enough signal, and it doesn't take much, you will overload the RFID chip and burn it out. A microwave oven on high for just a moment does the trick in my own tests. The chip I tested was inside of a credit card and I fried it on high for about 2 seconds - On-Off! The card is still operational using the magnetic strip and the numbers embossed on it but the RFID chip is fried and the antenna was nicely crisped. The hologram (nickel) was also fried and is now unreadable.

posted by Fergie @ 6/27/2006 11:38:00 AM