CEO Stratton Sclavos told analysts Thursday that VeriSign is looking into the technology, and suggested that the company’s directory lookup infrastructure, currently used in its telephony and DNS services, would be a good fit.

Sclavos said that VeriSign is absolutely pursuing an RFID business, but cautioned: RFID is a monumental change in how supply chains and packaged goods work, and is going to take some time.

He added: That being said, we feel very well positioned as one of very few number of technology companies that could handle the transaction rate and query rate that those types of systems are going to look for.

RFID is a method of tracking objects through the use of small tags that respond to radio transceivers in such devices as hand scanners or doorway mounts. The system has been likened to a less manually intensive version of the common barcode.

The technology has been around since the 1960s, and is used in vehicle immobilizers, but only recently have the size, costs and power requirements come down to the point where businesses are contemplating embedding the tags in virtually every product.

An early adopter of the technology has been Tesco, the UK supermarket chain. Tesco in January said it was piloting RFID-aware shelves with razor-maker Gillette. Wal-Mart and Proctor & Gamble are also advocates of the technology.

The shelves communicate with the company’s inventory management system so employees know when they are running out of a particular product, helping reduce losses due to theft or lack of stock.

Widely deployed, RFID technology could require real-time lookups of billions of database records, and this, Sclavos suggested, is where VeriSign’s ATLAS (advanced transaction lookup and signaling system) could come into play.

ATLAS is currently used to handle telecoms transactions and billions of domain name system lookups every day. VeriSign is the custodian of the .com and .net DNS infrastructure, as well as running some of the DNS root servers.

The RFID technology is not without controversy. Privacy advocates warn that the technology could be abused by unscrupulous merchants. For example, tags embedded in clothing could be linked to customer databases and triggered when a person walks into a store.

The Association for Automatic Identification and Data Capture Technologies (AIM), a 900-member trade association representing makers of RFID and other technologies, says that security will be built into RFID products.

But its case was not helped when confidential marketing documents were found, free from any kind of security, on the web site of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where development is being carried out.

In the documents, public relations agency Fleischman-Hillard laid out a series of steps that could be used to calm the public’s concerns. One step was to dispose of the term RFID Tag in favor of the more friendly, though apparently meaningless, Green Tag.

Source: Computerwire