"After several years in Silicon Valley, if someone asks me what is the most common, I won't say it's the engineer's pants and plaid shirt, nor the model 3 all over the street, but the work card / access card hanging on every employee of a technology company
It can be said that it is the simplest and most effective way of identity authentication. But the trouble is, if you change your pants and leave your work card at home, it's still troublesome. You can either go home and get it, or just work from home
Is there a better way of certification than work card?
Talking about this with a friend, she sent me a link, saying it was an NFC chip that could be implanted into the human body. I'm also a little surprised: does this kind of thing that only appears in Bond films really exist?
This chip is called vivokey spark:
After looking at the official website of the chip, I found that the company dared to think too much.
Such a chip with a length of about 1 cm and a diameter of 2.1 mm can be used as a login authentication device, replace the key, become a work card / access card / bus card, and store the private key of the digital wallet.
Because it's small enough to be implanted into the body. The recommended placement is in the tiger mouth of the hand, that is, in the fascia tissue between the thumb and index finger. The product comes with a needle tube and disinfection and dressing supplies. Any medical worker and professionals with puncture qualification (such as ear piercers and tattooers) can complete the operation in five minutes.
After completing the implantation and configuration, you can open the door, take the bus, log in to the website, and even verify the bitcoin transaction!
But my first feeling is: isn't it narrowing the RFID tag? Can it be as powerful as claimed?
And in the circle of efficiency people, RF tags are not new. A few years ago, I wrote a bunch of RF tags and pasted them in my home and office. For example, when I went to the unit to scan, my mobile phone turned on and muted; Sweep at home, automatically connect the speaker, start playing music, etc.
What I don't understand about this chip is that since cards and labels are already very convenient, why choose a more complex and high-risk way to implant a strange thing into your body?
With a question in mind, I contacted Amal graafstra, the developer of vivokey spark.
As a result, I not only found the answers to these questions, but also found that the original vivokey spark and the technology of human chip implantation itself have far-reaching significance than I thought.
Amal works in Seattle. Previously, he was engaged in IT consulting. He has always been interested in human implant chips. He also operates a website dedicated to selling NFC / RFID devices for "human enhancement", called dangerous things.
At present, Amal has a chip implanted in each of his hands, but these are not all the chips on him
Spark is indeed a reduced version of ordinary RF card / tag. It has the same chip and coil as the RF card (iso15693 NFC type 5 chip, 13.56MHz).
Therefore, spark can theoretically replace the NFC card based on RF. Using the supporting Android application (IOS can read and cannot write due to operating system restrictions), users can write different functions on spark,
For example, in the use scenario of access control card, the ID of the card is public and can be read without security verification. It is also easy to copy and write to spark. In this way, the first function of spark is available.
Amal's first NFC chip was implanted in his hand in 2005. He has been using this chip to open the doors of his home and office for more than ten years. Even his car has been modified to unlock with a "wave of his hand".
Many years later, Amal found that the biggest effect of using implanted chips to replace keys and physical door cards is not how much time is saved, but to reduce psychological pressure to a great extent.
"If you think carefully, we have a lot of time to think about 'do I have the key or not' every day, which has become an ongoing psychological burden." He said that now he has no such burden at all.
But Amal doesn't represent everyone. When he and others promote the technology of NFC chip implantation, the most common question he hears is: since NFC is so insecure, why do you use it to replace our keys, cards and passwords, and even save the key of digital wallet?
If you know a little about NFC technology, you may know that most of the common RF cards are Java cards. Generally speaking, in addition to the NFC coil, the card also has an embedded Java virtual machine, which can run multiple "applets" and can also have encryption capability.
For example, UnionPay cards that support flash payment need random numbers generated by two-way card swiping machine and encryptor in the card to realize safe payment. Similarly, this encryptor can also be used to generate other keys.
Amal revealed that vivokey's products adopt the technology provided by fidesmo, a world-famous Swedish company in NFC development, and have supported many mainstream encryption functions, such as 2fa authenticator.
You can also write the digital currency wallet program into spark. The security of using it as a digital currency wallet is much better than storing the private key in a computer, an offline hard disk, or even writing it on a note - after all, spark itself has no power supply and no Internet connection, and it is where you go, so you don't have to worry at all.
However, we all know that there is no such thing as extreme safety in the world. Finally, ask the question: what if someone cuts off your hand?
Amal explained that in theft and robbery, offenders often try their best not to interact with the victims. For example, your car always has broken windows when you are away. In the end, it is still a question of risk return ratio. " If you were the president of the United States and could control nuclear weapons, it would be worth it... But didn't you have a bodyguard at that time? "
Buzzfeed reporter implanted the provided chip and completed the payment by hand, causing a sensation. Screenshot from CNBC
Of course, considering that digital currency players do not account for the majority among the public, few people dare to put their wallets in their bodies. Spark wants to prove its ability in financial payment, I'm afraid it has to find another way out.
The simplest way is through the mobile payment software venmo. In the United States, a reporter of buzzfeed implanted xnt (the predecessor of spark) and wrote his venmo account link on it. When the restaurant owner scanned the chip with his mobile phone, he scanned the link to complete the collection.
In fact, fidesmo mentioned earlier also has a payment API for MasterCard. Users can add cards to any chip that supports fidesmo API to complete NFC payment.
Soon, vivokey will also launch its own Pgp, webauthn Internet authentication, u2f hardware security key and other functions to complete login in daily environment.
People like Amal call themselves "biohackers". In short, this group of people use the mentality of hackers to complete some simple or complex bioengineering. On reddit, the subreddit belonging to this group has more than 10000 members.
Some biological hackers will do some highly complex experiments in their own homes according to the standards of authoritative institutions; Sometimes it doesn't need to be so complicated. Tracking your physiological indicators to improve your health is also a kind of biological hacker; Amal belongs to a subspecies of this group: grinders.
For grinders, as long as a technology product can be installed or embedded into their body in some way, even if it can bring a little ability improvement, they will actively try. Due to funding and other reasons, such products usually do not (and are unlikely to) pass the medical safety certification
But this will not discourage Amal from implanting chips. In fact, this technology has existed for many years and its security has been tested for a long time: pet implant chips have been popularized in European and American countries and a few cities in China. The chip on them has the function of saving identity, master data and medication records. Amal points out that if pets can use it, people can use it.
Will implantation of chips lead to physiological rejection and infection? Does the chip move in the body cause damage?
When implanted, the human body will indeed respond to the chip, but the side effects and degree are far less exaggerated: the human body will secrete collagen around the small glass tube and closely combine with the surrounding muscle tissue. In this way, not only the chip is protected, but also it will not cause physical damage to the human body.
Amal found that people's fear of implanting a chip always dissipates after understanding how it works.
As mentioned earlier, the chip itself is not connected to the network without power supply. This is because it completely depends on the electromagnetic effect, that is, the electromagnetic field emitted by the card reading device generates electric energy to drive the chip. When the chip is not in use, it does not emit any form of radiation, so it has no ability to have a considerable impact on health.
To put it bluntly: you carry many cards with you, and even hang the work card around your waist (near the reproductive organs). If you don't worry about it, there's no need to worry about chip implantation.
From the perspective of non replicability, implanted chips such as spark may be a more reliable biometric authentication method than faces and fingerprints.
"In this age, whoever holds your key will master your identity and become 'you'. The key here includes not only the physical key, but also your bank card, password, your fingerprint and face, "Amal said.
Admit it, in fact, each of us is in a state of identity crisis every day. We are always worried that our keys and bank cards will be lost and our passwords will be leaked by Equifax and other companies without eyes. Are faces and fingerprints safe? Not necessarily. In the past, many researchers have verified that face recognition (even faceid) can be deceived by imitations.
You don't even need to go to a bar to drink to leave fingerprint evidence: last year, there was a famous case in Britain. A drug dealer took a picture of drugs in his hand to prove that he had goods. As a result, the police obtained the picture and extracted fingerprints from it, so as to successfully catch the drug dealer.
What about implants? It has opened a new experience in this era of self danger: only when the subject of identity is really on the scene and takes the initiative to carry out a verification action can it pass - this is the ultimate way of authentication.
"All the answers are biometric encryption. The encryptor is placed in your palm, which doesn't need care or worry at all. It's like your kidney. It's doing important things, but you don't worry about their state at all. This is our positioning for implanted chip products. " Amal said.
Originally, when I came into contact with this project, I still had a little idea of abandonment. Unexpectedly, after some understanding, I found myself convinced by this product and wanted to try it.
Spark is conservatively estimated to be able to work for at least 50 years. The shell adopts 8625 bioactive glass produced by Schott, Germany, which has good resistance to extreme cold and heat, high pressure, vacuum and physical shock; Its anti-magnetic interference ability is also good. Generally, the NMR is 1.5 or 3 T, while spark can carry the strength of up to 7 T in the experiment.
Because spark is produced according to relevant RF standards, any iso15693 certified RF reading device can read the public ID of the chip and interact with the encryption function in the chip.
This small chip is currently available on websites such as dangerous things for $109“
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