NFC technology is becoming more and more relevant in our lives. One of its major uses is in ticketing solutions. However, most of companies use bad implementations of NFC technology. By this talk we will explain a complete solution, analyzing security challenges and outlining the best practices and implementation choices.
Most of NFC ticketing solutions are based on MIFARE ULTRALIGHT chips. The main topic of our talk is why and how these implementations are vulnerable. The whole talk will be divided in two main sections: The first one we're going to deal with is about the vulnerabilities which may occur if you do not pay enough attention to security topics. We're focusing on 3 areas in which frauds are possible: I. Bad use of GPS and internet protocol to apply fees. II. Correct use of OTP sector in ULTRALIGHT chips. III. Correct data stamping on tickets. In the second part we will show a proof of concept of a validation machine which uses a secure way to validate tickets. The machine is based on an Arduino Uno device, and we're going to use MIFARE ULTRALIGHT as kind of NFC chips to keep the whole solution low cost. All source code will be made available as opensource just after the talk to let everyone use it to create secure solutions in the world.