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Smart-Card Hacking?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-exactly-do-they-put-on-these-things dept.

W3bbo asks: "With the ever-increasing information being stored on so-called 'Smart-Cards', including credit cards with the chips, how do we know what data is read by stores when you hand over your plastic? Seaching for 'smart-card hacking' just turns up satelite TV piracy websites and virtually nothing for (sort-of) legitimate investigation to our cards. So what methods are available to hack smart-card chips and see what information about us our banks store on our cards?"

3 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Kind of Esoteric, But... by fuzzybunny · · Score: 4, Informative

    The best way to learn is to latch onto someone who really knows their stuff (which is what I did on a previous project.) If you don't have that luxury, start looking at vendor pages (Schlumberger, ActivCard, Siemens, Utimaco, Gemplus, etc.) and chipset manufacturers (Infineon, Sagem or Giesecke & Devrient for example.)

    Depending on how far down you want to dig (do you want to learn about applications? Circuit design? Interfaces? Security issues?) you should probably browse around related manufacturers' pages and related newsgroups. A good example would be looking at PKCS#11-related docs, Entrust implementation docs, the Javacard specifications, how Javacards differ from other implementations, docs on "Open Platform", types of card readers (class 1 through class 4, what is "middleware", how hardware key storage works, etc.)

    A lot of card-related documentation and information is strongly vendor-specific, poorly documented and, to be honest, largely irrelevant for someone who wants to learn about it in a not-too-hardcore manner.

    If you're professionally seriously interested, I recommend talking to one of the serious pros, such as Jerome Ajdenbaum who really know their stuff. For starters, though, a quick google search on "smart card" +documentation turned up a number of good results, including from Microsoft (whose card interface for many manufacturers and variants is surprisingly well-written), ,a href="http://java.sun.com/products/javacard/refere nce/docs/">Java card docs from Sun, and the Open Card platform.

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    1. Re:Kind of Esoteric, But... by swillden · · Score: 4, Informative

      Along with PKCS#11 and Javacard, you should be looking at all the ISO 7816 specifications for technical information.

      The ISO 7816 specs are generally not free. You buy them from your national standards body, which in the US is ANSI. It'll cost around $150-$200 to buy the whole set from ANSI.

      However, much of the content of the 7816 documents is replicated in the EMV specifications. EMV stands for Europay Mastercard Visa and is a consortium for establishing smart card banking standards, so if you're interested in looking at your bank card chip, that's the more relevant set of documents anyway. You can find all of the EMV documents on-line, free, at the EMVCo web site. You may still have to acquire some of the 7816 specs (parts 3 and 4 are probably the most important), but the EMV docs contain most of what you need. Word of warning: be prepared to plow through a lot of material. Smart card technology has acquired a lot of complexity through 30 years of incremental enhancements.

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  2. Re:it's called carding... by Mattcelt · · Score: 4, Informative

    One of the original smart card hacks was done by Ben Jun, Paul Kocher, and Joshua Jaffe, the guys at Cryptography Research, using a technique called "Differential Power Analysis" which they did with a $50 HP oscilliscope to extract the private key stored on a smart card. You can find the white paper here.