RFID makes one lap before security is breached.

The fast track to wireless technology seems to be happening way to fast. Companies are coming up with new ideas and patents all the time but may be releasing them to the consumer before they are proven. The RFID tags that are being used in department stores and on racing tires have been found to be as secure as leaving your front door open at your house.

It has recently been found that passports and other ID cards that incorporate radio chips can be remotely spied on, jammed and even copied. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology uses a chip about the size of a grain of rice to send short range radio signal to scanners to authenticate people and track objects.

At the Black Hat conference, Lukas Grunwald, of German computer security company DN-Systems, showed that RFID passports can be cloned with relative ease. He found that passports designed according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standard can be cloned. "The whole passport design is totally brain damaged," Grunwald told Wired.com. "From my point of view, all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all."

At the same conference, Kevin Mahaffey and John Hering of US computer security company Flexilis showed that electronic passports can be remotely spied upon despite the radio-blocking shields included in US designs. They found they could read the devices from 60 centimetres away if the passport is opened by just 1 cm.

The conference also featured a demonstration of a device, called the RFID Guardian, which can be used to hijack radio signals. It can emulate other readers and also to block legitimate RFID signals, claims its creator Melanie Rieback, a researcher from Vrije University in the Netherlands.

RFID technology is already widely used by Wal-Mart to track inventories and shipments. NASCAR uses them on Goodyear racing tires. The European Central Bank has talked of putting RFID technology in European currency, and the tags were also used to track World Cup 2006 Soccer tickets.