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    SCADA Security Presentation

    This is a presentation I gave on SCADA security some time ago. It was originally set for about 2 hrs, although I broke it into 2 halves so if time permitted (or the partisipants wanted more inforamation), the backend of the presentation has many more areas and guidence relaing to SCADA, devices, environment security, etc.

    I defined the following outcomes for the presentation:

    • Broaden the awareness and necessity of security within the SCADA environment.
    • Understanding of business role in the governance/risk identification process.
    • Heighten the understanding of technology risks.

    I hope people find the material interesting and useful.

    SCADA Security Presentation Derek Grocke

    How To Hijack Fast Food Drive-Thru Frequencies

    This is an article I found on the Phone Losers site I thought I would copy here so I can give it a go at some stage.

    How To Hijack Fast Food Drive-Thru Frequencies

    A few years back, some friends and I were messing around with a Taco Bell’s drive-thru frequencies. RijilV and isotek showed me how easy it was to hijack the frequencies of just about any fast food restaurant with a very simple mod to a ham radio. The radios they used were Yaesu VX-5 and VX-7 models. We had a few weeks of occasional fun, sitting a few parking lots away and saying all kinds of horrible things to potential fast food customers. For the most part, I didn’t record any of it. But you can find a few clips of our fast food hijinks if you scroll down on the PLA Sound Clips Archive page.

    Finally we decided to capture a bit of our FCC violations on video. But instead of capturing actual customers being harassed by us as they placed an order, I drove through the Taco Bell drive-thru myself with a video camera sitting on the dashboard. As I attempted to place my order, RijilV informed me of some crazy new Taco Bell policies and a manager immediately rushed out to explain to me that I wasn’t actually talking to an employee. Here is that video:

    After spending several years on Google Video and YouTube, it’s been watched approximately 20,000 times. And of those 20,000 people who have viewed it, approximately all of them have emailed me and asked me what kind of radio we used and how can they use a radio to do the same thing. So in the spirit of April 1st and in order to quell the number of emails sent to me and posts on the PLA Forums asking the same thing, I’ve decided to write this tutorial to help those people out.

    But I’m not going to explain how to modify a Yaesu VX5 or a Yaesu VX7. A simple Google search will show you how to modify these ham radios. The problem with these mods is that, even though they’re fairly simple, you have to buy the radios which could cost you anywhere from $200 – $400. Then, after removing a couple solder points, you have to learn how to use it, you have to look up fast food frequency lists, you have to understand the difference between the transmit frequencies and the receive frequencies and you have to scroll through PL tones using trial and error to find the correct one.

    Or how about we do this a different way. A way that uses a couple items that you might already have in your home. You can easily modify most old CB radios in a way that will allow them to transmit directly to drive-thru frequencies. You won’t have to scroll through hundreds of possible drive-thru frequencies, because a CB radio’s channels line up in exactly the same way as most drive-thru’s channels, only at a higher frequency. How do you get your CB radio to run at a higher frequency? A simple replacement of the crystal inside, with a 6.5536 MHz crystal. This triples the megahertz that are broadcast on and there is no learning required. You just take the modified CB radio to a fast food restaurant and start broadcasting to the customers.

    “But RBCP, I don’t have a 6.5536 MHz crystal lying around my house,” you might be whining at this point. But this isn’t true. Just about any house has several 6.5536 MHz crystals in them if you know where to look. This just happens to be the exact same crystal that you can find in electric heaters, hair dryers, electric stoves, curling irons, electric hot water heaters, irons, and toasters. These crystals are in just about any item that has heated coils and are used to control the frequency of the heating elements so that they don’t burn your house down.

    So for this modification you need…

    • 1 CB radio. It has to be a 40 channel CB radio with a digital display, which includes just about any CB radio manufactured after the mid 1980’s. The old 23 channel CBs from the 1970’s will not work. It can even be a walkie talkie CB radio. If you don’t have one, you can find one at Goodwill or a yard sale for probably less than $10.
    • 1 toaster. (Or other item with heating elements inside.) A toaster is the most ideal to use, because it’s almost guaranteed to have the crystal inside of it. It’s more common to find curling irons and hair dryers that don’t. Again, it should be a toaster manufactured within the past 20 years or so. Before that they didn’t have crystal requirements for toaster manufacturers. (And incidentally, there were a lot more electrical house fires back then.) Goodwill will probably have a toaster for less than $10.
    • 1 soldering iron and solder. Don’t worry if you don’t have soldering experience. It’s actually pretty easy. Click here for a soldering tutorial. You can purchase a soldering iron at Radio Shack or Sears for about $10.
    • A few screwdrivers

    Even if you have to buy all these materials, you’re only out $30. That’s a lot better than the $300 you might end up spending on a Yaesu radio. And some of you might already have all these items so you don’t have to pay anything. Ask a friend or a relative if they’ve got an old toaster or CB radio lying around that they don’t need.

    First you’ll want to take apart your toaster. This isn’t too hard. Just flip it upside down and start removing the screws. You’ll probably need to pull off the plastic lever and knobs before you remove the top of the toaster. Once you have the top off, you’ll see a green or brown circuit board inside.

    Flip the circuit board down and you’ll see all the components on the other side, including the 6.5536 MHz crystal. The crystal is silver and will have 6.5 stamped on the side of it. In the picture below, I’ve used an arrow to show you where it’s located.

    The crystal is likely in a different spot in other toasters, but it’s hard to mistake for any other electronic component. The crystal will have some form of 6.5 stamped on the side of it. In my toaster, it showed 6.55-12. While the official frequency needed is 6.5536 MHz, anything within 1.6 megahertz will work. So don’t worry if your crystal just says 6.5 or 6.50 – it’s all the same for our purposes.

    It’s kind of hard to see what I’m doing in the picture above, but I’m heating up the leads on the crystal from underneath with my soldering iron to melt the solder, and I’m pulling on the crystal from above with a pair of needle nose pliers. It only takes a few seconds to get the crystal out of the toaster.

    Now that the crystal is out of your toaster, throw your toaster away! Do not attempt to use it once the crystal is removed. Remember, the crystal is in there for safety and using your toaster without the crystal could burn your toast and/or start a kitchen fire. It’s likely your toaster won’t even turn on with the missing crystal, but please don’t even try. Just throw it away.

    As I mentioned before, just about any brand and model of CB radio will work, as long as it has the digital display on it. Which means, just about any CB radio manufactured after the mid 1980’s. These are the kinds of CB radios whose frequencies are controlled by a single crystal inside of them. For my mod, I used a Radio Shack TRC-207 walkie talkie CB radio, which is pictured above. I prefer using a walkie talkie CB radio because it doesn’t requiring sticking a huge CB antenna on the roof of my car which might be noticed if a fast food employee starts looking around the parking lot for the culprits.

    Taking apart your CB radio is just as easy as taking apart the toaster. Remove the screws and pop it open. You may or may not have to lift up the circuit board inside to find the crystal inside. In my particular model, the crystal actually plugged into a socket so I didn’t need to even desolder the old crystal. I just pulled it out with my fingers and then plugged in the new 6.55 MHz crystal. I don’t know how common this is, because in other CB radios that I’ve modified the crystal was soldered to the circuit board, just like in the toaster.

    Put your CB back together and test it to make sure it’s working. You’re finished! Obviously, you won’t be able to talk on normal CB channels anymore since your CB is transmitting and receiving at a much higher frequency now. But who cares, CB channels are lame anyway. Let’s hop in the car and drive to our nearest fast food establishment to test it out.

    Sit near the drive-thru and wait for a customer to pull up. While the customer is talking to the drive-thru speaker, start flipping through your channels until you hear them talking. I’ve found that most drive thrus end up being somewhere in the 16 – 25 channel range. I’ve never found one above channel 30 and only a few on channels 1 through 15. It all depends on how their drive-thru is set up and what frequencies they’re using. Anyway, push down your talk button and start talking to the customer.

    The cool thing about using a CB radio to transmit on drive-thru frequencies is that a CB is designed to work for several miles. The headsets that those fast food people wear are only designed to work for about 100 feet. So you can easily overpower the employees, even if you’re several parking lots away. In fact, you may be inadvertently screwing with several other drive-thrus in town without even knowing it. This is more likely when you’re using the kind of CB radio that’s supposed to be installed in a car. Those usually run on 5 watts and can cover an entire city. This is another reason I like to use my walkie talkie. It’s lucky if it will work for even a mile, so I’m only harassing one restaurant at a time.

    If you found this tutorial useful, you might also enjoy the video I’ve made on the same subject. It includes much of the same information in this tutorial, but also includes actual footage of us messing with a drive-thru with this CB mod. Enjoy!

    You might also enjoy our original Taco Bell Takeover video, our Happy Birthday drive-thru video and our Drive-Thru Shenanigans video.

    icon for podpress PLA TV: Hijacking Fast Food Frequencies [9:12m]: Download (4913)

    Local Copy

    DUKPT Overview and Transaction notes

    Hi,

    I was asked on another post relating to DUKPT to provide some backgound. Given I have lots of material on the subject, I thought I would create this thread. Link

     

    I will come back at some stage and expand on this when I get time.

    Transaction Process narrative:

    The diagram describes a mobile terminal/ATM is described using the a AS2805 (‘2805’) message type and 3DES DUKPT and dual direction auth SSL from the terminal to the aquirer (transaction switch).

    A good explanation of DUKPT can also be found at Wikipedia.

     

    Diagram of the flow

     

    DUKPT transaction flow - terminal to bank

    DUKPT transaction flow - terminal to bank

     

    Background notes:

    • The terminal or ATM firstly encrypts the user entered pin (may be a unique DUKPT key or static, depending on the design and banks involved) prior to incorporating it into the AS 2805 transaction message.
    • the message is then encrypted again using the DUKPT key which has been established through the merchant logon process within the aquirer Host Security Module (HSM) i.e. the user entered pin is encrypted separately and encapsulated within the DUKPT encrypted 2805 message to provide full message encryption.
    • In the diagram a separate dual authenticating SSL session is also used between the terminal/ATM and the aquirers infrastructure. This allowing the transaction including the pin to traverse the external Wired/GPRS/LAN within 2 primary independent layers of encryption, with a 3rd protecting the PIN.
    • When the transaction enters the aquirer environment the message encapsulation layer provided by SSL is removed.  This leaving the DUKPT’ed 2805 message which also encapsulates the separately encrypted PIN.
    • This encrypted message is passed to the aquirer switch engine through to the aquirer’s HSM for decryption of the 2805 message excluding the user entered pin.
    • This is when transactional information necessary for aquirer’s merchant reporting (truncated card number, transaction amount, transaction type, etc.) and fraud management data is collected.
    • The aquirer switch then passes the encrypted PIN to the aquirer HSM requesting that the PIN be decrypted using the aquirer’s PIN encryption and translated to the next banks (Bank 1)  PIN Encryption Key (Pin translation only occurs within the aquirer HSM) This is then sent back to the aquirer Switch engine as the Bank 1 encrypted PIN.
    • The aquirer switch engine then send the decrypted 2805 message with the newly encrypted PIN back to aquirer HSM to be encrypted with the Bank 1 MAC key.
    • The resultant Bank 1 key encrypted message is then sent to Bank 1 for processing and/or passing to the card issuer (using a similar process as described above).
    • When the result is received back from the issuing bank it is encrypted with the Bank 1 MAC key (the pin will not be present in the result message).
    • This is then decrypted by the aquirer HSM, the transaction fate result stored into the aquirer merchant reporting system and the transaction fate re-encrypted with the original aquirer DUKPT key (should be different per terminal/merchant instance) and the result sent back to the terminal through the original established SSL encrypted terminal connection.

    The aquirer may terminate the the SSL connection on a hardware device such as a CISCO Content Service Switch (CSS), or equivalent instead of the design described in the diagram which terminates onto a SSL session server/gateway (Possibly including a Certificate Authority) or on the aquirer transaction switch.

    When PIN blocks are received by the aquirer processing centre, the PIN encryption is translated from the terminal key to the Local Master Key (LMK) by the Host Security Modules (HSM).

    When the message is sent on the upstream bank interchange link to the issuer or gateway , the aquirer HSM translates the encrypted PIN block from the LMK to the Zone Master Key (ZMK) of the aquirer interchange link. The PIN block is always encrypted using DEA3 (3DES) whenever outside of the Terminal or ATM.

    HSM-8000-User Guide V2.2

    Breaking VISA PIN

    Below is an article I found recently. This one of the most comprehensive descriptions of PIN Verification Value (PVV) hacking.

    I thought I would replicate it here for my local reference.

    As comments have been made regarding the grammar used in the original text, I have corrected some of the obvious errors whilst maintaining the context of the original material.

    http://69.46.26.132/~biggold1/fastget2you/tutorial.php

    ——– Original Text ———-

    Foreword
    Have you ever wonder what would happen if you lose your credit or debit card and someone finds it. Would this person be able to withdraw cash from an ATM guessing, somehow, your PIN? Moreover, if you were who finds someone’s card would you try to guess the PIN and take the chance to get some easy money? Of course the answer to both questions should be “no”. This work does not deal with the second question, it is a matter of personal ethics. Herewith I try to answer the first question.

    All the information used for this work is public and can be freely found in Internet. The rest is a matter of mathematics and programming, thus we can learn something and have some fun. I reveal no secrets. Furthermore, the aim (and final conclusion) of this work is to demonstrate that PIN algorithms are still strong enough to provide sufficient security. We all know technology is not the weak point.

    This work analyses one of the most common PIN algorithms, VISA PVV, used by many ATM cards (credit and debit cards) and tries to find out how resistant is to PIN guessing attacks. By “guessing” I do not mean choosing a random PIN and trying it in an ATM. It is well known that generally we are given three consecutive trials to enter the right PIN, if we fail ATM keeps the card. As VISA PIN is four digit long it’s easy to deduce that the chance for a random PIN guessing is 3/10000 = 0.0003, it seems low enough to be safe; it means you need to lose your card more than three thousand times (or losing more than three thousand cards at the same time 🙂 until there is a reasonable chance of losing money.

    What I really meant by “guessing” was breaking the PIN algorithm so that given any card you can immediately know the associated PIN. Therefore this document studies that possibility, analyzing the algorithm and proposing a method for the attack. Finally we give a tool which implements the attack and present results about the estimated chance to break the system. Note that as long as other banking security related algorithms (other PIN formats such as IBM PIN or card validation signatures such as CVV or CVC) are similar to VISA PIN, the same analysis can be done yielding nearly the same results and conclusions.


    VISA PVV algorithm


    One of the most common PIN algorithms is the VISA PIN Verification Value (PVV). The customer is given a PIN and a magnetic stripe card. Encoded in the magnetic stripe is a four digit number, called PVV. This number is a cryptographic signature of the PIN and other data related to the card. When a user enters his/her PIN the ATM reads the magnetic stripe, encrypts and sends all this information to a central computer. There a trial PVV is computed using the customer entered PIN and the card information with a cryptographic algorithm. The trial PVV is compared with the PVV stored in the card, if they match the central computer returns to the ATM authorization for the transaction. See in more detail.

    The description of the PVV algorithm can be found in two documents linked in the previous page. In summary it consists in the encryption of a 8 byte (64 bit) string of data, called Transformed Security Parameter (TSP), with DES algorithm (DEA) in Electronic Code Book mode (ECB) using a secret 64 bit key. The PVV is derived from the output of the encryption process, which is a 8 byte string. The four digits of the PVV (from left to right) correspond to the first four decimal digits (from left to right) of the output from DES when considered as a 16 hexadecimal character (16 x 4 bit = 64 bit) string. If there are no four decimal digits among the 16 hexadecimal characters then the PVV is completed taken (from left to right) non decimal characters and decimalizing them by using the conversion A->0, B->1, C->2, D->3, E->4, F->5. Here is an example:

    Output from DES: 0FAB9CDEFFE7DCBA

    PVV: 0975

    The strategy of avoiding decimalization by skipping characters until four decimal digits are found (which happens to be nearly all the times as we will see below) is very clever because it avoids an important bias in the distribution of digits which has been proven to be fatal for other systems, although the impact on this system would be much lower. See also a related problem not applying to VISA PVV.

    The TSP, seen as a 16 hexadecimal character (64 bit) string, is formed (from left to right) with the 11 rightmost digits of the PAN (card number) excluding the last digit (check digit), one digit from 1 to 6 which selects the secret encrypting key and finally the four digits of the PIN. Here is an example:

    PAN: 1234 5678 9012 3445
    Key selector: 1
    PIN: 2468

    TSP: 5678901234412468

    Obviously the problem of breaking VISA PIN consists in finding the secret encrypting key for DES. The method for that is to do a brute force search of the key space. Note that this is not the only method, one could try to find a weakness in DEA, many tried, but this old standard is still in wide use (now been replaced by AES and RSA, though). This demonstrates it is robust enough so that brute force is the only viable method (there are some better attacks but not practical in our case, for a summary see LASEC memo and for the dirty details see Biham & Shamir 1990, Biham & Shamir 1991, Matsui 1993, Biham & Biryukov 1994 and Heys 2001).

    The key selector digit was very likely introduced to cover the possibility of a key compromise. In that case they just have to issue new cards using another key selector. Older cards can be substituted with new ones or simply the ATM can transparently write a new PVV (corresponding to the new key and keeping the same PIN) next time the customer uses his/her card. For the shake of security all users should be asked to change their PINs, however it would be embarrassing for the bank to explain the reason, so very likely they would not make such request.

    Preparing the attack


    A brute force attack consists in encrypting a TSP with known PVV using all possible encrypting keys and compare each obtained PVV with the known PVV. When a match is found we have a candidate key. But how many keys we have to try? As we said above the key is 64 bit long, this would mean we have to try 2^64 keys. However this is not true. Actually only 56 bits are effective in DES keys because one bit (the least significant) out of each octet was historically reserved as a checksum for the others; in practice those 8 bits (one for each of the 8 octets) are ignored.

    Therefore the DES key space consists of 2^56 keys. If we try all these keys will we find one and only one match, corresponding to the bank secret key? Certainly not. We will obtain many matching keys. This is because the PVV is only a small part (one fourth) of the DES output. Furthermore the PVV is degenerated because some of the digits (those between 0 and 5 after the last, seen from left to right, digit between 6 and 9) may come from a decimal digit or from a decimalized hexadecimal digit of the DES output. Thus many keys will produce a DES output which yields to the same matching PVV.

    Then what can we do to find the real key among those other false positive keys? Simply we have to encrypt a second different TSP, also with known PVV, but using only the candidate keys which gave a positive matching with the first TSP-PVV pair. However there is no guarantee we won’t get again many false positives along with the true key. If so, we will need a third TSP-PVV pair, repeat the process and so on.

    Before we start our attack we have to know how many TSP-PVV pairs we will need. For that we have to calculate the probability for a random DES output to yield a matching PVV just by chance. There are several ways to calculate this number and here I will use a simple approach easy to understand but which requires some background in mathematics of probability.

    A probability can always be seen as the ratio of favorable cases to possible cases. In our problem the number of possible cases is given by the permutation of 16 elements (the 0 to F hexadecimal digits) in a group of 16 of them (the 16 hexadecimal digits of the DES output). This is given by 16^16 ~ 1.8 * 10^19 which of course coincides with 2^64 (different numbers of 64 bits). This set of numbers can be separated into five categories:

    Those with at least four decimal digits (0 to 9) among the 16 hexadecimal digits (0 to F) of the DES output.

    Those with exactly only three decimal digits.

    Those with exactly only two decimal digits.

    Those with exactly only one decimal digit.

    Those with no decimal digits (all between A and F).

    Let’s calculate how many numbers fall in each category. If we label the 16 hexadecimal digits of the DES output as X1 to X16 then we can label the first four decimal digits of any given number of the first category as Xi, Xj, Xk and Xl. The number of different combinations with this profile is given by the product 6 i-1 * 10 * 6j-i-1 * 10 * 6k-j-1 * 10 * 6 l-k-1 * 10 * 1616-l where the 6’s come from the number of possibilities for an A to F digit, the 10’s come from the possibilities for a 0 to 9 digit, and the 16 comes from the possibilities for a 0 to F digit. Now the total numbers in the first category is simply given by the summation of this product over i, j, k, l from 1 to 16 but with i < j < k < l. If you do some math work you will see this equals to the product of 104/6 with the summation over i from 4 to 16 of (i-1) * (i-2) * (i-3) * 6i-4 * 16 16-i ~ 1.8 * 1019.

    Analogously the number of cases in the second category is given by the summation over i, j, k from 1 to 16 with i < j < k of the product 6i-1 * 10 * 6j-i-1 * 10 * 6k-j-1 * 10 * 616-k which you can work it out to be 16!/(3! * (16-13)!) * 103 * 6 13 = 16 * 15 * 14/(3 * 2) * 103 * 613 = 56 * 104 * 613 ~ 7.3 * 1015. Similarly for the third category we have the summation over i, j from 1 to 16 with i < j of 6 i-1 * 10 * 6j-i-1 * 10 * 616-j which equals to 16!/(2! * (16-14)!) * 102 * 614 = 2 * 103 * 615 ~ 9.4 * 1014. Again, for the fourth category we have the summation over i from 1 to 16 of 6i-1 * 10 * 616-i = 160 * 615 ~ 7.5 * 1013. And finally the amount of cases in the fifth category is given by the permutation of six elements (A to F digits) in a group of 16, that is, 616 ~ 2.8 * 1012.

    I hope you followed the calculations up to this point, the hard part is done. Now as a proof that everything is right you can sum the number of cases in the 5 categories and see it equals the total number of possible cases we calculated before. Do the operations using 64 bit numbers or rounding (for floats) or overflow (for integers) errors won’t let you get the exact result.

    Up to now we have calculated the number of possible cases in each of the five categories, but we are interested in obtaining the number of favorable cases instead. It is very easy to derive the latter from the former as this is just fixing the combination of the four decimal digits (or the required hexadecimal digits if there are no four decimal digits) of the PVV instead of letting them free. In practice this means turning the 10’s in the formula above into 1’s and the required amount of 6’s into 1’s if there are no four decimal digits. That is, we have to divide the first result by 104, the second one by 103 * 6, the third one by 102 * 62 , the fourth one by 10 * 63 and the fifth one by 64 . Then the number of favorable cases in the five categories are approximately 1.8 * 1015, 1.2 * 1012, 2.6 * 1011 , 3.5 * 1010, 2.2 * 109 respectively.

    Now we are able to obtain what is the probability for a DES output to match a PVV by chance. We just have to add the five numbers of favorable cases and divide it by the total number of possible cases. Doing this we obtain that the probability is very approximately 0.0001 or one out of ten thousand. Is it strange this well rounded result? Not at all, just have a look at the numbers we calculated above. The first category dominates by several orders of magnitude the number of favorable and possible cases. This is rather intuitive as it seems clear that it is very unlikely not having four decimal digits (10 chances out of 16 per digit) among 16 hexadecimal digits. We saw previously that the relationship between the number of possible and favorable cases in the first category was a division by 10^4, that’s where our result p = 0.0001 comes from.

    Our aim for all these calculations was to find out how many TSP-PVV pairs we need to carry a successful brute force attack. Now we are able to calculate the expected number of false positives in a first search: it will be the number of trials times the probability for a single random false positive, i.e. t * p where t = 2^56, the size of the key space. This amounts to approximately 7.2 * 10^12, a rather big number. The expected number of false positives in the second search (restricted to the positive keys found in the first search) will be (t * p) * p, for a third search will be ((t * p) * p) * p and so on. Thus for n searches the expected number of false positives will be t * p^n.

    We can obtain the number of searches required to expect just one false positive by expressing the equation t * p^n = 1 and solving for n. So n equals to the logarithm in base p of 1/t, which by properties of logarithms it yields n = log(1/t)/log(p) ~ 4.2. Since we cannot do a fractional search it is convenient to round up this number. Therefore what is the expected number of false positives if we perform five searches? It is t * p^5 ~ 0.0007 or approximately 1 out of 1400. Thus using five TSP-PVV pairs is safe to obtain the true secret key with no false positives.

    The attack


    Once we know we need five TSP-PVV pairs, how do we get them? Of course we need at least one card with known PIN, and due to the nature of the PVV algorithm, that’s the only thing we need. With other PIN systems, such as IBM, we would need five cards, however this is not necessary with VISA PVV algorithm. We just have to read the magnetic stripe and then change the PIN four times but reading the card after each change.

    It is necessary to read the magnetic stripe of the card to get the PVV and the encrypting key selector. You can buy a commercial magnetic stripe reader or make one yourself following the instructions you can find in the previous page and links therein. Once you have a reader see this description of standard magnetic tracks to find out how to get the PVV from the data read. In that document the PVV field in tracks 1 and 2 is said to be five character long, but actually the true PVV consists of the last four digits. The first of the five digits is the key selector. I have only seen cards with a value of 1 in this digit, which is consistent with the standard and with the secret key never being compromised (and therefore they did not need to move to another key changing the selector).

    I did a simple C program, getpvvkey.c, to perform the attack. It consists of a loop to try all possible keys to encrypt the first TSP, if the derived PVV matches the true PVV a new TSP is tried, and so on until there is a mismatch, in which case the key is discarded and a new one is tried, or the five derived PVVs match the corresponding true PVVs, in which case we can assume we got the bank secret key, however the loop goes on until it exhausts the key space. This is done to assure we find the true key because there is a chance (although very low) the first key found is a false positive.

    It is expected the program would take a very long time to finish and to minimize the risks of a power cut, computer hang out, etc. it does checkpoints into the file getpvvkey.dat from time to time (the exact time depends on the speed of the computer, it’s around one hour for the fastest computers now in use). For the same reason if a positive key is found it is written on the file getpvvkey.key. The program only displays one message at the beginning, the starting position taken from the checkpoint file if any, after that nothing more is displayed.

    The DES algorithm is a key point in the program, it is therefore very important to optimize its speed. I tested several implementations: libdes, SSLeay, openssl, cryptlib, nss, libgcrypt, catacomb, libtomcrypt, cryptopp, ufc-crypt. The DES functions of the first four are based on the same code by Eric Young and is the one which performed best (includes optimized C and x86 assembler code). Thus I chose libdes which was the original implementation and condensed all relevant code in the files encrypt.c (C version) and x86encrypt.s (x86 assembler version). The code is slightly modified to achieve some enhancements in a brute force attack: the initial permutation is a fixed common steep in each TSP encryption and therefore can be made just one time at the beginning. Another improvement is that I wrote a completely new setkey function (I called it nextkey) which is optimum for a brute force loop.

    To get the program working you just have to type in the corresponding place five TSPs and their PVVs and then compile it. I have tested it only in UNIX platforms, using the makefile Makegetpvvkey to compile (use the command “make -f Makegetpvvkey”). It may compile on other systems but you may need to fix some things. Be sure that the definition of the type long64 corresponds to a 64 bit integer. In principle there is no dependence on the endianness of the processor. I have successfully compiled and run it on Pentium-Linux, Alpha-Tru64, Mips-Irix and Sparc-Solaris. If you do not have and do not want to install Linux (you don’t know what you are missing 😉 you still have the choice to run Linux on CD and use my program, see my page running Linux without installing it.

    Once you have found the secret bank key if you want to find the PIN of an arbitrary card you just have to write a similar program (sorry I have not written it, I’m too lazy 🙂 that would try all 10^4 PINs by generating the corresponding TSP, encrypting it with the (no longer) secret key, deriving the PVV and comparing it with the PVV in the magnetic stripe of the card. You will get one match for the true PIN. Only one match? Remember what we saw above, we have a chance of 0.0001 that a random encryption matches the PVV. We are trying 10000 PINs (and therefore TSPs) thus we expect 10000 * 0.0001 = 1 false positive on average.

    This is a very interesting result, it means that, on average, each card has two valid PINs: the customer PIN and the expected false positive. I call it “false” but note that as long as it generates the true PVV it is a PIN as valid as the customer’s one. Furthermore, there is no way to know which is which, even for the ATM; only customer knows. Even if the false positive were not valid as PIN, you still have three trials at the ATM anyway, enough on average. Therefore the probability we calculated at the beginning of this document about random guessing of the PIN has to be corrected. Actually it is twice that value, i.e., it is 0.0006 or one out of more than 1600, still safely low.

    Results


    It is important to optimize the compilation of the program and to run it in the fastest possible processor due to the long expected run time. I found that the compiler optimization flag -O gets the better performance, thought some improvement is achieved adding the -fomit-frame-pointer flag on Pentium-Linux, the -spike flag on Alpha-Tru64, the -IPA flag on Mips-Irix and the -fast flag on Sparc-Solaris. Special flags (-DDES_PTR -DDES_RISC1 -DDES_RISC2 -DDES_UNROLL -DASM) for the DES code have generally benefits as well. All these flags have already been tested and I chose the best combination for each processor (see makefile) but you can try to fine tune other flags.

    According to my tests the best performance is achieved with the AMD Athlon 1600 MHz processor, exceeding 3.4 million keys per second. Interestingly it gets better results than Intel Pentium IV 1800 MHz and 2000 MHz (see figures below, click on them to enlarge). I believe this is due to some I/O saturation, surely cache or memory access, that the AMD processor (which has half the cache of the Pentium) or the motherboard in which it is running, manages to avoid. In the first figure below you can see that the DES breaking speed of all processors has more or less a linear relationship with the processor speed, except for the two Intel Pentium I mentioned before. This is logical, it means that for a double processor speed you’ll get double breaking speed, but watch out for saturation effects, in this case it is better the AMD Athlon 1600 MHz, which will be even cheaper than the Intel Pentium 1800 MHz or 2000 MHz.

    In the second figure we can see in more detail what we would call intrinsic DES break power of the processor. I get this value simply dividing the break speed by the processor speed, that is, we get the number of DES keys tried per second and per MHz. This is a measure of the performance of the processor type independently of its speed. The results show that the best processor for this task is the AMD Athlon, then comes the Alpha and very close after it is the Intel Pentium (except for the higher speed ones which perform very poor due to the saturation effect). Next is the Mips processor and in the last place is the Sparc. Some Alpha and Mips processors are located at bottom of scale because they are early releases not including enhancements of late versions. Note that I included the performance of x86 processors for C and assembler code as there is a big difference. It seems that gcc is not a good generator of optimized machine code, but of course we don’t know whether a manual optimization of assembler code for the other processors (Alpha, Mips, Sparc) would boost their results compared to the native C compilers (I did not use gcc for these other platforms) as it happens with the x86 processor.

    Update

    Here is an article where these techniques may have been used.

    http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/08/could-a-hacker.html

    Lethal Toxins Entering Your Body

    I recently read an article in a magazine and was shocked to see some of the toxic dangers which modern living introduce. Australian Men’s Health April 2008, by Susan Casey, pg 87.

    I thought I would expand on this article here as a method of analysing some of the things Kerry and I need to be careful of. I hope this also assists others in understanding some of these dangers.

    “Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated every bit of plastic ever manufactured still exists”

    Toxic

    Articles

    Polycarbonate

    Bottles (marked with a #7 in a triangle)

    Cling wrap and plastic takeaway containers (marked with a #7)

    Dangerous

    Ingredients

    Bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic oestrogen, which can leach into the bottle’s contents when heated.span>

    Phthalates, a probable human carcinogen and endocrine disruptor, can seep into food (especially fatty foods, such as delis meats and cheeses).

    Linked to

    Prostate cancer, reduced sperm count and reproductive-organ abnormalities, according to US studies at the universities of Missouri, Chicago and Cincinnati.

    Reproductive problems like undescended testes and low sperm count, reveal researchers at New York’s University of Rochester and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US.

    How to reduce your exposure

    Pots, pans and bottles made from stainless steel are a non-toxic alternative. If you’re using polycarbonate, keep it out of the dishwasher and replace it every 60 days or if it’s scratched. Plastic releases toxins over tie when damaged or exposed to high heat.

    Keep it out of microwave and dishwasher. Don’t store fatty or acidic foods in these containers, rather use waxed paper and buy meat wrapped in paper from the butcher. If you use plastic-wrapped cuts, trim the edges off where the product touched the wrapping.

     

    Toxic

    Articles

    Polystyrene cups and takeaway containers (marked with a #6)

    Fast-food containers (with waxy lining) and non-stick (Teflon) pans.

    Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used in vinyl flooring, shower curtains and car interiors.

    Dangerous

    Ingredients

    Styrene, a possible human carcinogen, can leah into the contents of the cup.

    Perfluoro-octanoic acid (PFOA), a grease-repelling flourotelomer chemical and likely human carcinogen, can transfer from the waxy-plastic coating onto the food inside, especially at high temperatures.

    Vinyl chloride is a known human carcinogen that gives off gas into the surrounding air, so it’s inhaled instead of ingested.span>

    Linked to

    Cancer, warn scientists at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development and the World Health Organisations International Agency for Research on Cancer.

    Cancer, lung and kidney damage, according to studies at the EPA and Environmental Working Group in the US.

    Cancer and liver damage, predicts both the EA and the Centre for Health and Environmental Justice in the US.

    How to reduce your exposure

    Never drink hot liquids out of polystyrene ups. Use paper ones (those without a wax lining) whenever possible or a ceramic coffee mug. If your takeaway comes in polystyrene, transfer it to ceramic dish or glass as soon as possible.

    The best alternatives to drive-through and delivery are sit-down restaurants and home cooking. At home, never use Teflon-coated pans. If you own any, replace with non-toxic cookware made from copper, cast iron or stainless steel.

    Use natural materials for home flooring. Buy a shower curtain made from hemp, which lasts longer and is naturally mildew-resistant. New vinyl gives off aerial toxins at highly concentrated levels, so open windows to air spaces where this material is present.

     

    These are also great articles:

    http://www.seattlepi.com/local/326907_plastic09.html

    http://www.bravenewleaf.com/environment/2008/02/updated-repeat.html

    http://www.breastcancerfund.org/clear-science/environmental-breast-cancer-links/plastics/

    http://io9.com/how-to-recognize-the-plastics-that-are-hazardous-to-you-461587850

    http://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/avoiding-toxins-in-plastic

    http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/04/11/plastic-use.aspx

    Amateur Radio Material

    One of the best sites on the net for Amateur Radio Material is located at the home of VK5MM. Check it out and find out why so many people are involved with this hobby world wide.

    VK5MM