Oyster travel card security broken and denial of service attacks on Tube gates ?

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It appears that security researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, have extended their previous demonstration of the flaws in their own Phillips MiFare based travel cards, to the similar system used in the London Oyster Card.

See the reports by ZDnet: and the translation of a report about the researchers' evidence to the Netherlands Parliament regarding such transport card vulnerabilities:

They can reportedly use an Oyster Card, and then re-set the monetary balance, something which shows that the system is possibly vulnerable to fraud.

Transport for London claim that they would detect such a scam within 24 hours and so it would only be limited one day's free travel.

However, this assumes that the Dutch researchers, or any criminals exploiting the same vulnerabilities, are using are not spoofing or re-programming the Oyster card's serial number every day, as well as re-setting the monetary credit balance, in which case, this will not be picked up via a nightly accounting reconciliation subroutine on the central database.

If randomly chosen, or specifically targeted Oyster card serial numbers were to be re-programmed, then the Transport for London / TranSys consortium anti-fraud routines could be abused to create a Denial of Service attack on random innocent travellers or specific targets.

More worryingly, it appears that they can also cause a software malfunction in the Tube Gates, which are then jammed shut, after their Denial of Service attack presumably sends the wrong sort of code to the system.

At busy stations during the rush hour, this sort of Denial of Service attack could cause a lot of misery, and could potentially put lives at risk, especially at those stations which have Oyster card barriers very close to the up escalators, where there is a risk of people get trampled by a panicked crowd.

Transport for London must immediately ensure that Tube gates cannot be jammed shut by such a software malfunction. This is a safety issue, and , as such, must be given a far higher priority than any anti-fraud measures.

Transport for London need to actually publicly demonstrate that they have responded properly, to make such potential attacks impossible, and not just issue public relations spin that claim that there is no real problem.

2 Comments

The Times has an article on the subject now:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4184481.ece

However it does not mention the Tube Gate Jamming denial of service attack.

It does have a creepy bit of complacent media spin from Transport for London:

Transport for London denied yesterday that any security breach had taken place. “This was not a hack of the Oyster system,” a spokesman said. “It was a single instance of a card being manipulated.”

TfL should not be waiting for a fraud or for someone to be injured or killed as a result of a Jammed Tube Gate, before they take action.

This is not a theoretical security weakness, it has actually been demonstrated in practice.

The whole Oystercard system crashed on Saturday 12th July 2008:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7503197.stm

Card fault hits London transport

The Oyster system on London's public transport network has suffered a fault, rendering the electronic cards inoperable for about five hours.

The cards are used as a form of payment across the city on the Tube, buses, trams and the Docklands Light Railway.

A fault lasting from about 0530 BST to 1030 BST on Saturday meant card readers did not work and some passengers could be charged a maximum fare by mistake.

Transport for London, apologised and said Oyster faults were "very rare".

It said a problem of this nature had not occurred since March 2006.

[...]

A spokeswoman said: "Due to a technical problem with the Oystercard computer system, card readers across the network have not been accepting cards.

"Ticket barriers have been left open so that passengers can pass through therefore journeys have not been adversely affected by this problem."

Machines used to place funds on the cards were also affected by the fault.

[...]

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