My first introduction to the technological transhuman movement was a few years ago when a friend showed me his implanted neomagnet and NFC chip. Once the nerves had healed around the neomagnet, he was able to feel EM waves emitted from nearby electronic devices – a useful trick for an electrical engineer. He used his NFC implant to store important information such as his wifi password. Despite my friend’s rather whimsical usage of these technologies, I believe that transhuman themed implants will be the future. This movement is currently limited by primitive machine-human interfaces, but will explode once humans can interact with machines without using their fingers. Early examples of this technology include bionic arms, military pilot eye tracking, thought-to-text neural implants.

That initial conversation sparked a latent interest in RFID technology (and thought-to-text, but that’s a separate post). I’ve never been a hardware guy so the prospect of getting my hands dirty is daunting. With all this newfound time, I’ve finally executed and bought some RFID toys. There’s a lot of meat in my RFID exploration journey but today is just a taster.

My current goal is to build a generic RFID skimmer. Despite the internet having a bunch of tutorials, they’re all rather disjoint and amateurish. This is perhaps indicative of the questionably grey area of building a “skimmer” instead of a “reader.” There’s a entire DIY spectrum for how first principles you want your build to be. While some folks have custom built entire RFID rigs, most people seem to opt for either an Arduino + cheap RFID sensor, or a dedicated RFID platform. For exploratory purposes, I’ve gotten both.

If you’re going with the Arduino approach, your RFID sensor module will most likely be a RC522. This is a cheap, easy to use module that only reads in the high frequency range (13.56MHz). I got mine for $7 on Amazon. Unfortunately, if you want to read in the low frequency range (125kHz), you’ll either need to custom build an antenna or upgrade to a Proxmark. The Proxmark is a dedicated RFID tool used by RFID hobbyists and security professionals alike. A self-proclaimed “RFID Swiss-army knife,” the Proxmark is a standalone piece of hardware and onboard firmware used to read, write, and analyze RFID signals. While the platform has gone through multiple generations, the software is open source and the resources plentiful. I got their budget offering, the Proxmark3 Easy for $90 on Amazon. Interestingly, the Proxmark manufacturers have recently been warning of Chinese look-alike clones.

More on my Proxmark3 experience later.