rfid

190 Articles

The Internet Of Football

January 31, 2020 by 37 Comments

While football in the United States means something totally different from what it means in the rest of the world, fans everywhere take it pretty seriously. This Sunday is the peak of U.S. football frenzy, the Super Bowl, and it is surprisingly high-tech. The NFL has invested in a lot of technology and today’s football stats are nothing like those of the last century thanks to some very modern devices.

It is kind of interesting since, at the core, the sport doesn’t really need a lot of high tech. A pigskin ball, some handkerchiefs, and a field marked off with some lime and a yardstick will suffice. However, we’ve seen a long arc of technology in scoreboards, cameras — like instant replay — and in the evolution of protective gear. But the last few years have seen the rise of data collection. It’s being driven by RFID tags in the player’s shoulder pads.

These aren’t the RFID chips in your credit card. These are long-range devices and in the right stadium, a computer can track not only the player’s position, but also his speed, acceleration, and a host of other statistics.

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NFC For Your Home Automation

January 30, 2020 by 26 Comments

If home automation in the IoT era has taught us anything, it is that no one wants to run wires. Many of us rent, so new cabling is not even an option, even if we wanted to go that route. If you want a unique sensor, you have to build your own, and [tmkThings] wanted an NFC scanner at his front door. Just like arriving at work, he scans his credentials, and the door unlocks automagically.

Inside a little white box, we find an ESP8266 speaking Wifi attached to a PN532 talking NFC, and both are familiar names on these pages. The code, which is available on GitHub, links up with IFTTT and MQTT. For the security-minded, we won’t see this on your front door, but you can trigger your imagination’s limit of events from playing your favorite jams at the end of the day to powering down all the televisions at bedtime.

NFC hacks are great because they are instantly recognizable and readers are inexpensive, but deadbolt hacking is delightful in our books.

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Why Buy Toys When You Can Build Them Instead?

November 8, 2019 by 10 Comments

Like many creative individuals who suddenly find themselves parents, [Marta] wanted to make something special for his children to play with. Anybody can just purchase an off-the-shelf electronic toy, but if you’ve got the ability to design one on your own terms, why not do it? But even compared to the fairly high standards set by hacker parents, we have to admit that the amount of time, thought, and effort that was put into the “Marta Musik Maschine” is absolutely phenomenal.

[Marta] was inspired by the various commercial offerings which use RFID and other technologies to identify which characters the child is playing with and respond accordingly. But since he didn’t want to get locked into one particular company’s ecosystem and tinkering with the toys seemed frowned upon by their creators, he decided to just come up with his own version.

Over the course of many posts on the Musik Maschine’s dedicated website, [Marta] explains his thought process for every design consideration of the toy in absolutely exquisite detail. Each of the writeups, which have helpfully been broken down for each sub-system of the final toy, are arguably detailed and complete enough to stand as their own individual projects. Even if you’re not looking to get into the world of DIY electronic toys, there’s almost certainly an individual post here which you’ll find fascinating. From the finer points of interfacing your Python code with arcade buttons to tips for designing 3D printed enclosures, there’s really something for everyone here.

The children of hackers are often the envy of the neighborhood thanks to the one-of-a-kind playthings provided by their parents, and considering the level of commitment [Marta] has put into a toddler toy, we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

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An RFID Ring For The Body Mod Squeamish

September 8, 2019 by 27 Comments

Some people get inked, while others get henna or those water transfer tattoos you might find in a box of Cracker Jack. [Becky] wanted the benefits of having an RFID tag in her finger — unlock doors or log into your computer with a swipe of your finger — but wasn’t ready to get an implant. Her solution: make an artistic ring that conceals a tiny glass capsule RFID tag.

Besides not having to shove some tech under your epidermis, there are a few other advantages: you can change out tags as easy as changing rings, for one. You can also easily loan your ring to someone just as you might give them keys to your door.

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Following Pigs: Building An Injectable Livestock Tracking System

August 27, 2019 by 43 Comments

I’m often asked to design customer and employee tracking systems. There are quite a few ways to do it, and it’s an interesting intersection of engineering and ethics – what information is reasonable to collect in different contexts, anonymizing and securely storing it, and at a fundamental level whether the entire system should exist at all.

On one end of the spectrum, a system that simply counts the number of people that are in your restaurant at different times of day is pretty innocuous and allows you to offer better service. On the other end, when you don’t pay for a mobile app, generally that means your private data is the product being bought and sold. Personally, I find that the whole ‘move fast and break things’ attitude, along with a general disregard for the privacy of user data, has created a pretty toxic tech scene. So until a short while ago, I refused to build invasive tracking systems – then I got a request that I simply couldn’t put aside…

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A Briefcase Pentesting Rig For The Discerning Hacker

July 3, 2019 by 18 Comments

In the movies, the most-high tech stuff is always built into a briefcase. It doesn’t whether whether it’s some spy gear or the command and control system for a orbiting weapons platform; when an ordinary-looking briefcase is opened up and there’s an LCD display in the top half, you know things are about to get interesting. So is it any surprise that hackers in the real-world would emulate the classic trope?

As an example, take a look at the NightPi by [Sekhan]. This all-in-one mobile penetration testing rig has everything you need to peek and poke where you aren’t supposed to, all while maintaining the outward appearance of an regular briefcase. Well, admittedly a rather utilitarian aluminum briefcase…with antennas sticking out. OK, so it might not be up to 007’s fashion standards, but it’s still pretty good.

[Sekhan] has crammed a lot of gear into the NightPi beyond the eponymous Raspberry Pi 3B+. There’s an RFID reader, an RTL-SDR dongle, an external HDD, plus the 12V battery and 5V converter to power everything. All told, it cost about $500 USD to build, though that figure is going to vary considerably depending on what your parts bins look like.

To keep things cool, [Sekhan] has smartly added some vent holes along the side of the briefcase, and a couple of fans to get the air circulating. With these cooling considerations, we imagine you should be able to run the NightPi with the lid closed without any issue. That could let you hide it under a table while you interact with its suite of tools from your phone, making the whole thing much less conspicuous. The NightPi is running Kali Linux with a smattering of additional cools to do everything from gathering data from social media to trying to capture keystrokes from mechanical keyboards with the microphone; so there’s no shortage of things to play with.

If you like the idea of carrying around a Pi-powered security Swiss Army knife but aren’t too concerned with how suspicious you look, then the very impressive SIGINT tablet we covered recently might be more your speed. Not that we think you’d have any better chance making it through the TSA unscathed with this whirring briefcase full of wires, of course.

Reverse Engineering Cyclic Redundancy Codes

June 27, 2019 by 17 Comments

Cyclic redundancy codes (CRC) are a type of checksum commonly used to detect errors in data transmission. For instance, every Ethernet packet that brought you the web page you’re reading now carried with it a frame check sequence that was calculated using a CRC algorithm. Any corrupted packets that failed the check were discarded, and the missing data was detected and re-sent by higher-level protocols. While Ethernet uses a particularly common CRC, there are many, many different possibilities. When you’re reverse-engineering a protocol that contains a CRC, although it’s not intended as a security mechanism, it can throw a wrench in your plans. Luckily, if you know the right tool, you can figure it out from just a few sample messages.

A case in point was discussed recently on the hackaday.io Hack Chat, where [Thomas Flayols] came for help reverse engineering the protocol for some RFID tags used for race timing. Let’s have a look at the CRC, how it is commonly used, and how you can reverse-engineer a protocol that includes one, using [Thomas’] application as an example.

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