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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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Science News:
quote:
The exercise in reverse engineering by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and RSA Laboratories in Bedford, Mass., shows that "an attacker with modest resources—just a few hundred dollars" of off-the-shelf equipment—can crack the codes of millions of car keys and the stubby wands that trigger the pumps at ExxonMobil gas stations, the team reports in a draft article posted Jan. 28 on the Internet (http://www.rfid-analysis.org/).
"There is a practical risk here," says team member Ari Juels of RSA, the company that created an encryption technique used throughout the Internet. |
quote:
By using only 40 bits and relying on the cleverness of their cipher, the transponder designers went wrong, says Rubin. After breaking the cipher, which was a major challenge met by trial-and-error methods and cryptographic expertise, "we just tried all possible keys," he says.
"This is a warning that you can't take shortcuts on the design of these systems," comments Internet-security specialist Steven M. Bellovin of Columbia University. |
These people never learn, do they? The 56-bit DES encryption could be cracked in less than 24 hours several years back. 40-bit encryption should be just a piece of pie now. 
Motorola 
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08-02-2005 12:34
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