Adam Laurie (Director, Aperture Labs)

PRESENTATION TITLE: RFIDler: A Software Defined RFID Reader/Writer/Emulator

PRESENTATION ABSTRACT:

Software Defined Radio has been quietly revolutionising the world of RF. However, the same revolution has not yet taken place in RFID. The proliferation of RFID/NFC devices means that it is unlikely that you will not interact with one such device or another on a daily basis. Whether it’s your car key, door entry card, transport card, contactless credit card, passport, etc. you almost certainly have one in your pocket right now!

RFIDler is a new project, created by Aperture Labs, designed to bring the world of Software Defined Radio into the RFID spectrum. We have created a small, open source, cheap to build platform that allows any suitably powerful microprocessor access to the raw data created by the over-the-air conversation between tag and reader coil. The device can also act as a standalone ‘hacking’ platform for RFID manipulation/examination. The rest is up to you!

In this talk I’ll cover the fundamentals of Software Defined Radio, and then show how low-level RFID communications could be considered in the same light. I will then go on to demonstrate the RFIDler prototype in action, reading, writing and emulating some common tags.

ABOUT ADAM LAURIE

Adam “Major Malfunction” Laurie is a security consultant working the in the field of electronic communications, and a Director of Aperture Labs Ltd., who specialise in reverse engineering of secure systems. He started in the computer industry in the late Seventies, and quickly became interested in the underlying network and data protocols.

During this period, he successfully disproved the industry lie that music CDs could not be read by computers, and wrote the world’s first CD ripper, ‘CDGRAB’. He was also involved various early open source projects, including ‘Apache-SSL’ which went on to become the de-facto standard secure web server. Since the late Nineties he has focused his attention on security, and has been the author of various papers exposing flaws in Internet services and/or software, as well as pioneering the concept of re-using military data centres (housed in underground nuclear bunkers) as secure hosting facilities.

Adam has been a senior member of staff at DEFCON since 1997, and also acted as a member of staff during the early years of the Black Hat Briefings, and is a member of the Bluetooth SIG Security Experts Group and speaks regularly on the international conference circuit on matters concerning Bluetooth security. He has also given presentations on forensics, magnetic stripe technology, InfraRed and RFID. He is the author and maintainer of the open source python RFID exploration library ‘RFIDIOt’, which can be found at http://rfidiot.org, and is an occasional blogger here: http://adamsblog.aperturelabs.com/