A team of university students in Sydney have cracked the secret algorithm used on Sydney's public transport tickets for buses, trains and ferries, which they say could allow them to print their own tickets.
The Sydney university students who cracked the algorithm used on Sydney transport tickets ... Theo Julienne, Karla Burnett, Damon Stacey and Dougall Johnson Photo: Darren Pauli/SCMagazine
Ticket To Ride - Europe Crack
To crack the algorithm used on the transport system's tickets they targeted, Mr Julienne said he and the other students used about $300 worth of equipment (magnetic card readers and some specially purchased tickets), their laptops and a "a few weeks" worth of their time at night (a few days of which was full-time work).
"We were surprised at how simple the encryption was," Mr Julienne said. "Ideally cryptography should be impossible to crack, even if a potential attacker or reverse engineer knows every detail about how it is implemented. This system on the other hand is relying completely on users not knowing how it is implemented, which may have been fine when it was introduced in the early '90s because much fewer people had access to the technology required to read the tickets, or computers fast enough to analyse the data."
It added that the new electronic ticketing system to be gradually introduced to Sydney's transport system starting with a testing period later this year did not use the cracked magnetic stripe used on paper tickets.
To crack the algorithm used on the transport system's tickets they targeted, Mr Julienne said he and the other students used about $300 worth of equipment (magnetic card readers and some specially purchased tickets), their laptops and a \\\"a few weeks\\\" worth of their time at night (a few days of which was full-time work).
\\\"We were surprised at how simple the encryption was,\\\" Mr Julienne said. \\\"Ideally cryptography should be impossible to crack, even if a potential attacker or reverse engineer knows every detail about how it is implemented. This system on the other hand is relying completely on users not knowing how it is implemented, which may have been fine when it was introduced in the early '90s because much fewer people had access to the technology required to read the tickets, or computers fast enough to analyse the data.\\\"
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