AIM Global RFID Experts Reject Virus Claims

The Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM Global) issued a statement yesterday in response to a paper delivered during the IEEE conference in Pisa, Italy. The paper, entitled, "Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?," claims that RFID tags can be used to corrupt databases and spread computer viruses.

"Many of the basic assumptions in the paper overlook a number of fundamental design features necessary in automatic data collection systems and good database design," said AIM Global president, Dan Mullen. "In other words, the researchers built a system with a weakness and then proceeded to show how the weakness could be exploited."

In response to the paper, RFID scientists and experts from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) emphasized that there are two types of RFID tags, ones that can be changed and ones that have fixed data. Systems with fixed data cannot be changed, so are immune to viruses.