The Anatomy of a Subway Hack

Architecture and Background

DEF CON 16 - Brenno J.S.A.A.F. de Winter:The Anatomy of a Subway Hack: Discussion This talk was given by Brenno de Winter in place of the much talked about canceled talk : The Anatomy of a Subway Hack:Breaking Crypto RFID's and Magstripes of Ticketing Systems by the original authors: Zack Anderson,Student, MIT RJ Ryan,Student, MIT Alessandro Chiesa,Student, MIT Original Summary & Bio's: In this talk we go over weaknesses in common subway fare collection systems. We focus on the Boston T subway, and show how we reverse engineered the data on magstripe card, we present several attacks to completely break the CharlieCard, a MIFARE Classic smartcard used in many subways around the world, and we discuss physical security problems. We will discuss practical brute force attacks using FPGAs and how to use software-radio to read RFID cards. We survey 'human factors' that lead to weaknesses in the system, and we present a novel new method of hacking WiFi: WARCARTING.

Vulnerability Analysis

We will release several open source tools we wrote in the process of researching these attacks. With live demos, we will demonstrate how we broke these systems. Zack Anderson is studying electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is an avid hardware and software hacker, and has built several systems such as an autonomous vehicle for the DARPA Grand Challenge. Zack is especially interested in the security of embedded systems and wireless communications.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

He has experience building and breaking CDMA cellular systems and RFID. Zack has worked for a security/intelligence firm, and has multiple patents pending. He enjoys building systems as much as he enjoys breaking them. RJ Ryan is researcher at MIT. His longtime passion for security has resulted in a number of hacks and projects, including a steganographic cryptography protocol.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

RJ works on a number of technical projects ranging from computer security to operating systems, distributed computation, compilers, and computer graphics. He enjoys learning how things work, and how to make things work for him. Alessandro Chiesa is a Junior at MIT double majoring in Theoretical Mathematics and in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Born and raised in Varese,Italy, he came to MIT with interests in computational algebraic geometry, machine learning, cryptography, and systems security. He has authored papers such as "Generalizing Regev's Cryptosystem", which proposes a new cryptosystem based on shortest vector problems in cyclotomic fields. He is currently working with Oracle's Database Security group. For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 16 Archive here: