RFID

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RFID - Followup on Vingcard

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RFID - Followup on Vingcard

Few times ago I have published an article about two RFID locks that I encountered while traveling and a rough blackbox analysis of these two technologies. Unfortunately, back then, I only had few samples of key cards regarding Vingcard’s locks and that led me to take false assumptions.

But I was lucky enough very recently as to meet this lock once more. And because it was a three weeks stay, it was pretty easy to purposely tell the reception that my card was not working anymore, a couple of times, in order to have them reprogram it (yay, I’m a bad guy!). The purpose here was, first, to check what values can change over time (they usually encode the duration of the stay instead of the checkout timestamp) and secondly, to ensure that there is not a kind of timestamp-dependant key.

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RFID, when the manufacturer matters...

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RFID, when the manufacturer matters...

Nowadays we can find RFID technology almost everywhere: in supermarkets (anti-theft), in assembly lines (identify & track items), in highways (tolls), in public transportation, in your passport and your credit card and it is also used by many companies and by hotels for access management.

This post is about the latter. Indeed, during my trips, should it be for business or for holidays, I have stayed in many hotels. Some of them were still using good old keys like you do at home, most of them still use magnetic cards and some were relying on RFID cards to give you access to your room. Unfortunately, the security level of such RFID access management highly depends on the manufacturer as we will see.