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Hardware Hacking Guide — Citizen Engineer
Solderingfool writes "MAKE Magazine's Phil Torrone and open source hardware hacker Ladyada from Adafruit Industries have a new video series called 'Citizen Engineer.' In the first video they show how a SIM card works, then build a SIM card reader which could be used to clone a SIM card. They also show how to use an old payphone as a regular home phone, later with coins, and for their final hack — how to 'Redbox' it. They released all the projects as open source, and the video is well produced."
FBI, Schmeff-Bee-Aii. I hope they get Woz on their series, doing his thing: phone hacking or whatever. The stuff he used to do, back in the day, applied to today's phone technology. VoIP spoofing? (Somebody help me out here: what was the hack that Woz is known for -- the phone hack, that is?)
Harold
Backing up your own SIM is perfectly legal, these are your data after all. Cracking your SIM to extract or modify operator keys is something else: since the card belongs to your operator you are not supposed to crack it open.
Anyway, cracking a smartcard is a very difficult and costly operation. Smartcard manufacturers took special care of making these tamper-resistant, so that the cost of extraction outweighs the gains by a very large factor. Without specialized hardware and complete specs from the manufacturer you are likely to fail miserably.
Smartcard readers can be purchased in some supermarkets in Europe, no black hat magic involved.
Well they did brute force the secret key (Ki) from their SIM using the reader they build, but as they said, newer SIMs will detect the high number of requests and self-destruct. Additionally this was a 5V SIM reader, and many modern SIMs are 3V in anycase.
The only thing that worried me in the video was the quality of the soldering!
Mike
-- Mike