Malaysia to Use RFID Number Plates Next Year

durianwool wrote in with a story about Malaysia's plans to introduce RFID number plates. It reads: "'The first thing thieves do after a car theft is change the registration plates,' Road Transport Department Director-General Ahmad Mustapha was quoted as saying. The microchips, using radio frequency identification technology, will be fixed into the number plates and can transmit data at a range of up to 100 meters (yards), the report said. They will have a battery life of 10 years, it said. "

No such thing as tamper-proof

[davidwr]

There is tamper-evident, and tamper-self-destructing.

Unless the car depends on the chip to work, it should be easy to disable the chip using microwaves or some such. The hard part is destroying it without causing visible damage to the tire.

Re:Now the second thing..

[arivanov]

And how exactly are you going to cross a road toll or a police checkpoint?

This is one of the few possible use of RFID which make sense. Your number plate is out in plain sight anyway, it is also visible at the same or greater distance as the reader range. So there is no privacy implication here. In fact many privately run road toll systems already use this tech and this is simply an extension to cover the entire country.

Compared to the alternatives like Ken Livingston's London CCTV camera recognition and the UK dept of tranport "GPS in every car" scheme this is considerably less privacy invasive and much much cheaper. In fact - I would prefer this to them any day (especially to the GPS in every car idea).

Re:Not groundbreaking

[thestuckmud]

I believe all new automobile tires in the U.S. come with unique, tamper-proof RFID chips in them already.

No. Not yet, anyway. There is a standard for auto tire RFIDs, that meets both automobile industry and retail requirements, but RFID industry sources say it will be years before these are widely deployed. Michelin is testing them. Goodyear has them to track leased race tires. Your car does not.

Even so, it may be time to start thinking of ways to extend that tin foil hat.

Brazil is on that wagon too

[Marcos Eliziario]

My country is going to introduce RFID plates, starting with cargo trucks, next year. What really pisses me off is that nobody here seems to care about the huge privacy issues related to this.

Re:Now the second thing..

[Sancho]

In a situation like this, you'd eventually see a complete turnover of traffic laws. Traffic analysts have shown that without speeders, congestion is unbelievable (or more accurately, if everyone is going the same speed, the congestion is terrible). Because so many people are willing to go the speed limit, and a few people drive below and above it, traffic flow is reasonable. Speeders only speed because there is a low chance of being caught.

With automatic tracking/ticketing of speeders, beyond the obvious problem of loaning your car to someone, you'll see the roads getting clogged constantly. Something will have to be done to alleviate the problem, and that something will either be having personal speed limits (you can drive faster if you pass a safety test), greater public transportation to reduce the cars on the road (I'm all for this--there's virtually none in my state), bigger roads (ug), or a reversal to manually tracked speeding.

Re:Now the second thing..

[4815162342]

Actually I have to agree with this. Normally I am opposed to the increasing use of technology in ways which reduce our privacy.
However in this case I think the benefits actually outweigh the costs.

I do see potential for abuse but I also see how this technology can be used to make car theft (and particularly resale) much more difficult.

The way I see it, it could work like this:

Licensing authority when issuing plates encodes the following information on the integrated chip:
"KV4782-Blue Honda Civic Saloon-VIN 1M8GDM9A_KP042788"
The proposed information being : License number-Description-Vehicle Identification Number

The trick being that, along with the plain-text, is stored a private key signed signature of the encoded data, using one of the recognised encryption/signing algorithms such as RSA.
Furthermore the private key used is only stored on the government issuing equipment and never on the chip itself. Thus no amount of tampering can reveal the key.

Granted there is still the requirement to ensure the security of the issuing machines. However this is can be solved with good old fashioned physical security, multiple keys, revocation lists etc.

The government then publishes the corresponding public keys allowing law enforcement agencies and other interested parties to validate license plates.
e.g. Officer stops the car, pulls out hand-held device compares the license plate and vehicle description. If he has any reason to be suspicious, he can also ask to inspect the VIN.

The other benefit of this system is that companies can start to offer hand held scanners which perform the same function.
Thus if I am buying a new car I can pull out my cheap $10 scanner and perform a verification that the car plate matches the VIN.
If the government then publish a list of stolen plates I can have a reasonable degree of confidence that the car I am buying isn't stolen.

I reckon that if such a system was in widespread use the lives of the car thieves would get considerably more difficult.
It will be very interesting to see how this system works out in Malaysia but if its done right I think it could be a powerful tool against crime.

Re:Now the second thing..

[p43751]

You would believe a road can handle more cars the faster they go. If you really looked at the facts you would find that with quite simple math you can draw a line-chart showing cars/hour and you would see that you are correct all the way up to around 17 km/h after that you actually get less cars/hour. The reason is quite simple, the space each car use increase as the speed go up so that every car will have enough space to stop(remember 1 sec. 2 sec.. 3..)

So max cars pr hour on a straight road all using a reasonable distance to the car in front is actually around 17 km/h. We did the math in highschool to mix math and physics. (we also calculated how much current will pass through you if you get run over by an electric train, how far would a bicyclist bounce if hitt by a truck etc..... fun times)