California's Wireless Road Tolls Easily Hackable

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 26, 2008 @01:54AM from the no-sir-I-was-in-seattle-at-the-time dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Nate Lawson, a researcher at RootLabs, has found a way to clone the wireless transponders used by the Bay Area FasTrak road toll system. This means you can copy the ID of another driver onto your own device and, as a result, travel for free while others foot the bill. Lawson also raises the interesting point of using the FasTrak system to create false alibis, by overwriting one's own ID onto another driver's device before committing a crime. Luckily, Lawson wasn't sued before he could reveal his research, unlike those pesky MIT students."

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Anonymous clubs by bugnuts · 2008-08-26 03:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

Perhaps this can be used to create privacy clubs, where they all travel on cloned cards and all share the bill. Their movements couldn't be tracked via this system as long as multiple people were using it.
I hope this wasn't posted already... I searched the thread for "Anonymous" and then felt kind of silly.