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According to Ars Technica, the RFID Guardian created by Melanie Rieback is a portable device for personal RFID privacy. The device creates a firewall which will either enable or prevent RFID queries.

As the tags showed up in increasingly sensitive applications, security became more of a concern—at least to researchers and privacy advocates. Rieback was one of those people. As a graduate student searching for a Ph.D. dissertation topic, she spent eight months reading computer science research papers and discovered that the number of published works on RFID security could be counted on both hands. “It became painfully obvious that there was a deficiency in the area of RFID, and there is so much work to be done,” she says.

So Rieback turned herself into one of the foremost academic authorities on RFID security and went on to develop the first RFID virus as a proof of concept. That got the industry’s attention. As Rieback tactfully puts it, there was a “mixed reaction” that even included some personal attacks. But other companies approached her team for consulting assistance within days of publishing the paper.

After doing her part to publicize these security shortcomings of many RFID implementations, Rieback moved on to the RFID Guardian project, which would give people a measure of control over their tags. It became her Ph.D. project, and when she finalizes the next version in the next eight months or so, she should earn her doctorate. Even when that happens, though, she has no plans to drop the project. “I think this is important enough that we should finish it,” she says. “We should get it out there.”

Eventual plans call for the Guardian to be incorporated into cell phones and PDAs, but the current model is a pocket-sized device that runs on its own battery and provides a circular 1m field of control over RFID tags, jamming any tags that the user does not want read.

Relevance: Seeing how she was able to create a really cool PhD project gives me inspiration when am developing my own project in the future.