Cyborg

The most common kind of body modification is to implant electronics inside of the human body. These can be medical devices like pacemakers or RFID/NFC chips.

RFID/NFC chips that can be implanted have the common use for access control and authentication. But it also is possible to use these implants to replace contactless payment cards

We will document the implanting of the chips we will be getting. We have decided for the X2.1 Dual implant as our first implant. It includes an RFID 125kHz chip as well as an NFC NTAG216 (13.56MHz) chip in one capsule. The implant measures 15mm in length and 2mm in diameter. It is bigger than the usual 12mm for these kind of implants so it is about the size of 2 rice corns in length.

Here we will provide a video of the implantation procedure.

All MiFare compatible tags can be write-locked. This is however permanent and you probably do not want your implanted tags to be read only. All MiFare compatible Tags, except MiFare Classic, therefore have lock-prevention. This will make the tags not lockable, and is also permanent.

You can write protect the tags with a password. Every time you want to rewrite on the tag you will need the password. This is non permanent.

So we recommend, for implants, to use lock-prevention and a password. This will make your tag future-proof and protect your data from being overwritten or locked, either by accident or by a malicious person.

The implants can be used in different kinds of experimental situations.

The implants can be used in different kinds of experimental situations.

The easiest of all, just writing a vCard to the tag, to be read by any NFC capable mobile phone.

Access control is one of the easier things to do with RFID/NFC. By using RFID you just needto be able to read the UID of the tag. RFID is very unsafe, meaning that it is easy to just copy the tag and write it to another chip. But for this to happen, there must be malicous intent. NFC on the other hand can either work like an RFID tag by just providing a UID (common for lockers like in public pools, they usually just register the UID). Or you can write data onto the tag. Depending on the tag used this can be encrypted. MiFare classic seems to be the most unsafe,since it can easily be cracked. NTAG2XX, MiFare ultralight and MiFareDesfire EV series have better encryption. So if you use encryption make sure to use the right tag, especially when you want to lock items of high value. The safest would be a Java-card (JCOP series). These tags, can run small applications and even include a token generator, and encrypted transmission. Most NFCenabled debitcards use these. (Credit cards, on the other hand, usually have a mag-stripe fallback which is very unsafe.)

It glows when near an NFC field. It has been ordered and will be implanted into Peter Alfons Loch.