jof is a hacker-type human that loves cats, all things telecom, Internet routing, ham radio, cycling, urbanism, and kindness.

He got time-rich over the pandemic years, and curious at the prevalence and opacity of RFID fobs in his life (office access, public transport, apartment building access, hackerspace access, payment cards, etc.), and so he started learning everything he could about how to interact with them.


Session

08-15
17:00
120min
RFID Exploration Workshop
jof

RFID-like technologies are becoming pervasive, but traditionally have not been very open or experimenter-friendly. In the past few years, a growing variety of hardware and software tools have been enabling open-source experimenters to interact with contactless devices in a new way.

In this workshop, we:
- Show some common tag types and demonstrate ways of identifying them
- Describe the very cheap/common Mifare Classic chip type and protocol
- Crack the secret keys inside a Mifare Classic card, and clone the content onto a copied card
- Have a cute, beepy badge reader to test cloned tags with; lights and sound will show you if your clone worked

Participants will:
- Learn some RFID basics, learn some UART (Serial Port) basics
- (With the PN532 boards) Solder on through-hole header pins
- Download and run open source software to control the hardware (works best on Linux; best-effort support for MacOS and Windows/WSL)
- Crack the "secret" unknown keys of a provided card, dumping it to a file
- Write the dump file to a new card, effectively cloning the original card

No novel research or new information will be presented -- this workshop is aimed at empowering more people to interact and experiment with the devices that surround us.
Seasoned RFID hackers are welcome to join in and hang out.

Milliways
Hardware Hacking Village