Is smartcard hacking entering script-kiddie phase?
Hackers have released tools that unlock the software stored on heavily fortified chips so researchers can independently assess their security and spot weaknesses.
At the heart of the the release, which was announced Wednesday at the Black Hat Security conference in Las Vegas, is Degate, software developed by Martin Schobert for hardware experts to analyze small silicon structures. It has recently been refined so it can be used by amateurs to analyze chips the size of smartcards.
The tools are the work of cryptographer Karsten Nohl and hardware hacker Christopher Tarnovsky, who are both veteran reverse engineers of extremely sophisticated smart chips. In 2008, Nohl and a team of colleagues cracked the encryption of the widely used Mifare Classic smartcard after physically dissecting its circuitry and analyzing it with a microscope and optical recognition software. The 18-month task uncovered a proprietary algorithm on one of the chips generated cryptographically weak outputs that allowed attackers to break or clone an individual card in just minutes.
