Play box

The competition program of the forum Positive Hack Days 2012 was rich not only in battles of hackers who tried to hack everything and everyone through the Internet, but also in “applied” competitions. One of such contests was “Box game”, during which the knowledge and skills of the contestants in the field of radio frequency identification systems were tested.

There were not very many people willing to take part in the competition, but those who did take the risk did not exactly regret it.

The task of the participants in the competition was to open containers (at least one of the two), locked with locks under the control of RFID readers. The corresponding RFID tags were fixed away from the readers in such a way that it was impossible to open the locks directly with their help.
')
To gain access to the contents of the container, participants had to copy the RFID tag and open the corresponding lock. Moreover, the distance from which the tag can be counted is also taken into account when determining the winner.

During the competition, both low-frequency (125 kHz) and high-frequency (13.56 MHz) RFID tags were used.

During the competition, participants were prohibited from:

• carry out any actions aimed at disabling locks with RFID-devices;
• attempt to destroy containers;
• prevent other participants from passing the test.
• Contestants used their own software and hardware.

Participants used KeyMaster PRO 4 RF duplicator and rewritable tags based on the T5557 chip to work with low-frequency tags.



High-frequency identification was built on a comparison of the zero sector of the Mifare Classic 1K card, which contains a unique tag identifier that is factory-flashed by the manufacturer and not available for recording to end users. Not so long ago, Chinese colleagues developed and launched for sale special tags that are identical to Mifare, but allow rewriting UID-cards. This label, along with the common USB-reader ACR-122U , was used by one of the participants, which allowed him to open the lock with a high-frequency reader.



In the end, both containers were opened. The winners were Nikolai Chernykh and Victor Alyushin. Congratulations!

PS “Box game” will definitely be developed at Positive Hack Days next year.