Biohacking (human implants)

Some people, having watched what a pet chip does, decide they'd like one too. The implant goes in the web of the hand between thumb and index finger: enough loose tissue to swallow a glass capsule, easy to present to a reader, and out of the way the rest of the time. The crowd that does this calls it biohacking. The chip is doing nothing a plastic card couldn't.

#The hardware

• It's basically a pet chip with a different brain. A glass capsule a couple of millimetres across, sealed the same way as the animal version, usually put in by a body-modification professional with the same kind of oversized needle.
• The chip inside is the interesting choice. Popular implants are either an LF chip that imitates a 125 kHz access badge, or an HF NFC tag (an NTAG-style chip) that any phone can read and write. Some people get one of each — one per hand.

#What people do with them

Open their own front door, unlock a car, hand a phone a contact link or a Wi-Fi handshake with a tap, or log into their own computer. It's the same set of jobs a badge or a sticker already does. The novelty is purely that it's under the skin instead of in a wallet.

#Before you book the appointment

• A pet scanner usually won't read it, and a phone only reads the HF kind. The chip you picked decides what can talk to it — LF versus HF is the whole story, and it doesn't change once it's in you.
• It's only as secure as the chip inside. An LF implant that recites a fixed ID has every weakness of the badge it imitates (see Why old cards are a bad idea); it's just harder to lose and impossible to hand back. "It's in my hand" is not a security feature.
• Upgrading means minor surgery. Cards get reissued every few years as the crypto moves on. An implant stays whatever it was the day it went in — the only patch cycle is a scalpel.
• It isn't a medical device. It wasn't designed around things like MRI scans, so tell the radiographer it's there.

With Your phone

An HF/NFC implant reads exactly like any NFC tag: bring the phone to the hand and it picks up whatever's written there. An LF (prox-style) implant it can't see at all — wrong band.

With Proxmark3

lf search or hf search identifies an implant in your own hand the same way it would a card. Hold the antenna right against the skin over the chip; the read range is tiny.

With Flipper Zero

125 kHz RFID → Read for an LF implant, NFC → Read for an HF one. Lay the back of the Flipper against the web of your hand and hold still — the capsule is small and the range is centimetres.