Category Archives: RFID

conference, hacking, RFID, security

24C3: Mifare Security

Seems that I have missed one of the most interesting speeches at 24C3.
Henryk Plötz and Karsten Nohl presented the recent developments in reverse engineering the Mifare RFID card. What they basically did is polishing away the different layers of the chip in the Mifare card and then visually analyze the layers, trying to find the cryptographic relevant parts. The security of the low-end Mifare Classic cards is to be concerned as broken. “Start migrating!” 😉 This does not have an impact on the high-end Mifare DESFire card. Check out the video!

Slides 1
Slides 2

Torrent of the video recording in Matroska / Vorbis / H.264
Torrent of the video recording in MPEG-4 / AAC-LC / H.264

RFID

OpenPCD arrival

Yesterday my OpenPCD did arrive.

OpenPCD

OpenPCD is a free hardware design for Proximity Coupling Devices (PCD) based on 13,56MHz communication. This device is able to screen informations from Proximity Integrated Circuit Cards (PICC) conforming to vendor-independent standards such as ISO 14443, ISO 15693 as well as proprietary protocols such as Mifare Classic. Contactless cards like these are for example used in the new electronic passports.
The intention of the OpenPCD project is to offer the users full hardware control of the RFID signal and to provide different output signals for screening the communication. With already existing Free Software from the OpenMRTD project for implementing the PCD side protocol stack of various RFID protocols, this project will happily extend the free toolchain around RFID verification.

Hopefully I will have some time next week to take a close look.