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Latest News in the Proxmark World

Iceman

Where

Radio Frequency Village
DEF CON 34

Duration

46 min

Surveys a year of Proxmark firmware and client changes, covering new RFID attacks, community contributions, and the Proxmark 5 hardware.

Summary

Iceman reviews the past year of development in the Proxmark ecosystem, the open-source RFID toolkit he has long maintained. He says users who have not updated recently are missing a lot, and he describes how the community picks release names through polls. He contrasts this collaborative model with the competing forks found in other projects.

The middle of the talk covers new attacks and protocol support. A key-recovery attack against iClass went from roughly 40 hours to about seven minutes after a contributor produced a bit-sliced CUDA implementation. Other additions include field-based glitching, key diversification routines for several card families, support for newer MIFARE clone chips and secure-channel cards, LF relay, Lua 5.4 scripting, and an MQTT bridge that lets clients be driven remotely.

The closing section introduces the Proxmark 5, which pairs an Arm microcontroller with an FPGA using an open toolchain, a BLE-capable ESP32 module, swappable antennas, and planned UHF support. The speaker also addresses crowdfunding shipping delays and urges listeners to buy genuine hardware and join the community channels. The main takeaway is to keep firmware current and contribute to the open codebase.

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