RFID Hacking: Live Free or RFID Hard

DEF CON 21

Presented by: Francis Brown
Date: Saturday August 03, 2013
Time: 13:00 - 13:45
Location: Track 1
Track: Track 1

Have you ever attended an RFID hacking presentation and walked away with more questions than answers? This talk will finally provide practical guidance on how RFID proximity badge systems work. We'll cover what you'll need to build out your own RFID physical penetration toolkit, and how to easily use an Arduino microcontroller to weaponize commercial RFID badge readers — turning them into custom, long-range RFID hacking tools.

This presentation will NOT weigh you down with theoretical details, discussions of radio frequencies and modulation schemes, or talk of inductive coupling. It WILL serve as a practical guide for penetration testers to understand the attack tools and techniques available to them for stealing and using RFID proximity badge information to gain unauthorized access to buildings and other secure areas. Schematics and Arduino code will be released, and 100 lucky audience members will receive a custom PCB they can insert into almost any commercial RFID reader to steal badge info and conveniently save it to a text file on a microSD card for later use (such as badge cloning). This solution will allow you to read cards from up to 3 feet away, a significant improvement over the few centimeter range of common RFID hacking tools.

Some of the topics we will explore are:

This DEMO-rich presentation will benefit both newcomers and seasoned professionals of the physical penetration testing field.

Francis Brown

Francis Brown (@security_snacks) CISA, CISSP, MCSE, is a Managing Partner at Bishop Fox (formerly Stach & Liu), a security consulting firm providing IT security services to the Fortune 1000 and global financial institutions as well as U.S. and foreign governments. Before joining Bishop Fox, Francis served as an IT Security Specialist with the Global Risk Assessment team of Honeywell International where he performed network and application penetration testing, product security evaluations, incident response, and risk assessments of critical infrastructure. Prior to that, Francis was a consultant with the Ernst & Young Advanced Security Centers and conducted network, application, wireless, and remote access penetration tests for Fortune 500 clients. Francis has presented his research at leading conferences such as Black Hat USA, DEF CON, RSA, InfoSec World, ToorCon, and HackCon and has been cited in numerous industry and academic publications. Francis holds a Bachelor of Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in Computer Science and Engineering and a minor in Psychology. While at Penn, Francis taught operating system implementation, C programming, and participated in DARPA-funded research into advanced intrusion prevention system techniques.


KhanFu - Mobile schedules for INFOSEC conferences.
Mobile interface | Alternate Formats