Putting your finger on it
Mastercard has already been testing credit cards with RFID tags that let you pay for things merely by waving it near a receiver (solving that massively annoying problem of having to swipe a card through a reader to pay for things), but now a professor at MIT (where else?) wants to combine that with biometrics and let you authorize payments by gliding your finger over your card:
Prof Selker has suggested taking the technology a step further and using the properties of radio waves as a security check. "By watching a finger moving around an antenna, we can literally see that the finger changes the antenna's behaviour," he told BBC News Online. "I could draw letters and it would tell just by where my finger is how that is affecting the radio signal, whether or not it was me."
Maybe we're missing something, but apart from scanning your fingerprint (which it doesn't sound like this does), how can the card actually know that it's your finger and not somebody else's? Would each individual person affect the RFID tag's radio signal in a unique way?
