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

A team of researchers have developed a method for extracting authentication keys out of HID encoders, which could allow hackers to clone the types of keycards used to secure offices and other areas worldwide.

At the Defcon hacker conference later today, those researchers plan to present a technique that allowed them to pull authentication keys out of the most protected portion of the memory of HID encoders, the company's devices used for programming the keycards used in customer installations. “Once the chain of custody is broken, the vendor no longer has control over who has the keys and how they’re used,” says Babak Javadi, cofounder of the security firm the CORE Group and one of the four independent researchers who found the new HID hacking technique. Compared with that key extraction, the earlier step in an HID cloning attack, in which a hacker covertly reads a target keycard to copy its data, isn't particular challenging, Javadi says.

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