Among the presentations that raised eyebrows at the recent DefCon convention in Las Vegas was one from RFID Guardian: A portable device that "offers personal RFID security and privacy management for people," as the Website of the RFID Guardian Project puts it.


In other words, the RFID Guardian can detect RFID tags and readers in the immediate vicinity and emulate tags, and then spoof RFID readers into believing that there tags present when there are none, or that there are no tags when they're actually present.



Developed by a team led by Melanie Rieback, a Ph.D. student at Vrije University in the Netherlands, the Guardian is currently in the prototype stage. But Rieback, an American doing her graduate work under Professor Andrew Tanenbaum of Vrije, definitely sees it as the forerunner of a consumer device.

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