Play in the box

The competitive program of the Positive Hack Days 2012 forum was rich not only in the battles of hackers who tried to hack everything and everything via the Internet, but also in “applied” competitions. One of these competitions was the “Box Game”, during which the competitors' knowledge and skills in the field of radio frequency identification systems were tested.

There weren’t very many people wishing to take part in the contest, but those who nevertheless took a chance didn’t regret it.

The task of the contest participants was to open containers (at least one of two), locked with locks under the control of RFID readers. The corresponding RFID tags were fixed away from the readers so that it was impossible to open the locks directly with their help.

In order to access the contents of the container, participants had to copy the RFID tag and open the corresponding lock. Moreover, the distance from which it will be possible to read the mark was also taken into account when determining the winner.

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

During the competition, participants were prohibited from:

• to 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.

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



High-frequency identification was based 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 is not writable by end users. Not so long ago, Chinese colleagues developed and launched special tags identical to Mifare, but allowing overwriting of UID cards. A similar tag, coupled with the common ACR-122U USB reader , 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 on Positive Hack Days next year.