Jefferson's Wheel

An external assessment of the Dutch OV-Chipkaart found the card to be vulnerable to various attacks and recommends additional protections as well as the migration to better cards. The report concludes that proprietary ciphers like the Mifare Crypto-1 stream cipher are hardly ever secure:

Indeed, the security of proprietary stream ciphers has a reputation of “falling apart” once exposed to scrutiny by the cryptographic expert community.

The report also recommends that public transport systems should be more open about their security measures to enable independent reviews. Similarly, the migration of current systems to more secure cards should be discussed publicly:

Providing open communication on progress towards the [migration] may have a deterrent effect on attackers and the independent review of draft versions of the plan should provide added confidence that migration will succeed.

We are certainly looking forward to reviewing new systems (and perhaps to suggesting improvements).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 1:49 am and is filed under Cryptography, RFID, Security.