[Noisebridge-discuss] clipper card hacking

Ryan Rawson ryanobjc at gmail.com
Thu Oct 7 20:43:41 UTC 2010


That's all really interesting.  I'm off to nyc for a week or so, so
I'll have to pick up later... The current issue would be even just
reading from the card.  The previous threads are noting that the cards
are 35 mhz, so the question is, how hard would it be to acquire or
construct/hack/modify a reader to read that frequency?

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Christie Dudley <longobord at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh, and links to EFF and ACLU discussions on the topic:
>
> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/reading-writing-and-rfid-chips-scary-back-school
> http://www.aclunc.org/issues/technology/blog/privacy_and_safety_questions_loom_over_federal_program.shtml
>
> There's a significant chance the ACLUs probes will cause the school
> district to backtrack and pull these, in which case equipment loans
> aren't going to happen.  But to me, a system that does as much as this
> and hasn't really been examined is worth at least poking about with.
> It's groundbreaking!
>
> Christie
> _______
> But wait... there's no FCC on the moon!
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Christie Dudley <longobord at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I don't feel like I can ethically hack these, having recently worked
>> for the company.  I can explain a little bit, but probably not a lot
>> more than you can find out for yourselves.
>>
>> I'm interested, however, in hacking another protocol that the EFF and
>> ACLU are interested in hacking a new active RFID protocol that they're
>> currently using on head start kids.  I have a few people thinking
>> about it already, and there's a good chance we can get equipment
>> loaned to us to hack.
>>
>> The protocol is still quite new.  ISO 24730-5 was only ratified in
>> April of this year.  The Chirp Spread Spectrum bit encoding is pretty
>> neat in that the encoding itself can be used to measure distance to
>> the source.
>>
>> Christie
>> _______
>> But wait... there's no FCC on the moon!
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Bryan Beeley <bryan at beeley.org> wrote:
>>> I was commuting using the Clipper/Translink card for a while, and I was
>>> able to get it to work almost every time, as long as I was paying
>>> attention.  It is just very particular about the way that you present
>>> the card to the reader.
>>>
>>> I would be interested in working with others on understanding the card.
>>> I also have software experience, and a fair amount of experience with
>>> hardware credentials and readers.  However, my experience with building
>>> custom hardware is fairly limited.
>>>
>>> Bryan
>>>
>>> On 10/04/2010 10:51 PM, Jonathan Lassoff wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Ryan Rawson<ryanobjc at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> It does seem that some swipes take longer than others, perhaps as low
>>>>> as 300-500ms.
>>>>>
>>>>> Why would anyone build a high volume transit system based on this?
>>>>>
>>>> Personally, I find Clipper/Translink pretty unusable. In the times
>>>> that I've tried to use it, it usually takes 1-2 seconds and 2-3 tries
>>>> before it successfully tags.
>>>>
>>>> I bummed that Muni is canceling their beautifully colored passes and
>>>> forcing people that want them to carry around RF cards. I liked being
>>>> able to collect the colored passes for posterity.
>>>> Now that I've started biking more, I've basically given up on Muni as a result.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>
>>>
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>>
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