Hacking Hotel Keys and POS Systems
Weston Hecker demonstrates magnetic secure transmission (MST) injection attacks against hotel electronic keycards and point-of-sale terminals to manipulate cash drawers and brute-force guest room credentials.
Summary
Flaws in Hotel Keycard Infrastructure
Hotel electronic lock systems and property management systems (PMS) rely on predictable data formats encoded onto guest keycards. Weston Hecker analyzes cryptographic and structural weaknesses in room key encoding schemes across hospitality management platforms.
Automating MST Injection and Brute-Force Key Generation
Using modified Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) transmitters, the researcher demonstrates how an attacker can capture legitimate card tracks and extrapolate adjacent guest room codes, enabling automated brute-force attacks against electronic guest room locks.
Keystroke Injection Against Point-of-Sale Terminals
The presentation reveals vulnerabilities in retail and hotel point-of-sale (POS) card readers, showing how malformed magnetic stripe waveforms can inject arbitrary keystrokes directly into POS operating systems to bypass authentication and open cash drawers.
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