Experts dismiss fears of smartcard security flaws

21 January 2008

Industry figures have denied that an alleged hacking incident exposes security flaws in commercial smartcard systems, including Transport for London’s Oyster card.

An international conference of hackers reportedly witnessed a demonstration that the Mifare chip, used in London, and proposed for elsewhere in England, was weakly encrypted and could by copied and rewritten.

This would allow hackers to travel for free, by either copying someone else’s card, or loading a card with credit without paying for it. But ITSO, the organisation facilitating the development of ‘smart’ technology for England’s concessionary travel scheme, claimed it had ‘recognised the risk of this kind of hacking attack’. It had apparently taken the hackers a week to ‘crack’ an individual card, a spokesman said.

But, even where this was done, ‘the transport products in the card still remain secure when the security seal is verified by the ITSO secure application module’.

A spokeswoman for TranSys, the consortium responsible for the Oyster card, agreed. ‘Should one security measure be breached, another will protect Londoners’ Oyster cards, and the system as a whole,’ she said.

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Experts dismiss fears of smartcard security flaws

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