Spychips, some privacy campaigners call RFID. Two years ago, when Melanie Rieback in 2005 was hunting for a research topic for her PhD, she settled on RFID security because "It was obvious there was a lot of work to be done."

Based at the department of computer science at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, Rieback, an American, caused a storm last year when she published a paper on RFID viruses. "I wrote a completely scientifically and factually neutral paper about how to use RFID to perpetuate common exploits like the ones on the Internet today," she says.

At The Inquirer.

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