Paul Moskowitz, a Ph.D. researcher at IBM's Watson Research Center, believes security is definitely an issue with RFID-tagged goods. Along with his colleagues, Moskowitz has invented what's referred to as Clipped Tag technology to help solve some of those basic security issues.
IBM, commercializing Moskowitz's work, announced Nov. 8 that it will license the Clipped Tag technology to RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag and label manufacturer Marnlen RFiD—the first manufacturer to license IBM's technology, which was announced earlier this summer. Marnlen, based in Markham, Ontario, will began producing and marketing the technology immediately.
For more on this topic, see Technology Focus: RFID in the Real World
To help move various industries along with RFID adoption—retail and pharmaceutical are most notably looking for ways to implement item-level RFID tags—Moskowitz has come up with a fairly simple answer to the increasingly convoluted privacy issue: the clipped tag. The idea is that by adding perforations to an RFID-chipped tag on a pair of jeans, for example, a consumer can rip the tag in half and at the same time rip the antenna that transmits radio waves that are in turn read by an RFID reader.
Ripping the tag, however, doesn't make the RFID chip unreadable. Rather it shrinks the read range in which the information on the tag can be transmitted—from about 30 feet down to two inches.
Read the full story on eWeek.com: RFID Maker Licenses IBM's Clipped Tag Technology
