I nearly fell through the floor last night when I heard that the Dutch interior affairs minister has admitted that the MiFare chip technology seen in RF-enabled smart travel cards in the Netherlands - and London plus other places around the world - is open to hacking.
Guusje ter Horst is reported to have revealed that researchers at the Radboud University in Nijmegen have "developed a method by which a large number of Mifare chip-cards is relatively easy to crack and
duplicate."
Ter Horst wrote in a letter to the Dutch Parliament that she was preparing supplemental security measures for some government buildings as a result of the findings.
The card technology is used in about two million travel and identity cards in the Netherlands, and around a billion (that's a lot) around the world.
MiFare's Web site, meanwhile, says its cards are in use by 500 million punters around the world. That's still a lot...
Posted by Steve Gold on 19 March, 2008From his base in Sheffield, England, Steve has been a journalist for far too long for his own good - actually, he's been a business journo/tech writer for 24 years, 20 of them full-time. He has specialised in IT security, business matters, the Internet and communications for most of that time.
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