How Hackers Extracted the ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ to Clone HID Keycards

HID Global's keycards are the front line of physical security for hundreds of companies and government agencies.

They can also be spoofed, it turns out, by any hacker clever enough to read one of those cards with a hidden device that brushes within about a foot of it, obtain an HID encoder device, and use it to write the stolen data to a new card.

Now a team of security researchers is about to reveal how one of HID 's crucial protections against that cloning technique is defeated.

Researchers have demonstrated it's possible to extract HID ’s sensitive keys by plugging an encoder into a PC running their software that instructs the encoder to transfer the authentication keys to a configuration card without encrypting them.

HID has since developed and released software patches for its systems that fix the problem, including a new one that will be released "very soon".

HID systems and other forms of RFID keycard authentication have, in fact, been cracked repeatedly, in various ways in recent decades .

But vulnerabilities like the ones set to be presented at Defcon may be particularly tough to fully protect against.

“Now customers and HID have to claw back control—and change the locks, so to speak,” Javadi says.