Nothing to crack in "Legic Prime" RFID chip cards security system
Security researchers Karsten Nohl and Henryk Plötz had already cracked the encryption of NXP’s "Mifare Classic" smart cards, and now they have taken apart and cloned the radio frequency IDs from the "Prime" product line of Swiss manufacturer Legic. "We can emulate the scanner, change commands, and finally emulate all cards," Nohl stated on Monday at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin He recommended that key customers of Legic, which issues RFID cards on the basis of the Prime category launched in 1992, at least migrate to the more recent "Legic Advant" product line as quickly as possible.
Like Mifare Classic, Prime smartcards are based on the standard frequency of 13.56 MHz, but Nohl says that Prime cards are much less common than their successors and are mainly popular in Europe. Despite their age, they are nonetheless marketed as high-security technology and used particularly for access control and staff IDs in nuclear power plants and airports in addition to being used as payment and multifunction cards. In general, Legic and its partners are highly secretive about how the chip cards work. For instance, it is not easy to get hold of an official scanner for the system. Overall, the experts say that they discovered "more encryption layers in the program code than actually fit on an RFID chip".
