Scratching RFID Exploitation - 0x02
Decided to build myself a RFID Reader/Writer using Arduino Uno and the RC522 RFID module.
Setting up the modules
Arduino is used for the whole computation and communicating with the RFID module. The stuff required to build one are:
- Arduino Uno - (Arduino Nano would probably do too)
- RFID RC522 module
- Jumper wires
- Breadboards and LED’s for later addition.
The schematics and instructions for making the same can be found here
Once the hardware is setup, the next thing to do is to install the Arduino IDE and import the libraries
Arduino IDE: https://www.arduino.cc/en/software
Import the libraries
Open the library manager in Arduino IDE and search for MFRC522. The same can be found in this GitHub Repo. You can import it either way, from the library manager or download the latest release from the repository and import it to the IDE.
Demonstration
Plug in the Arduino and confirm that the drivers are installed and is detected in the IDE.
Check if the Board and Port are selected as per the device model.
There are many sketches available in the imported RFID library. Interesting one seems to be RFID-Cloner.
Ran the firmware_check sketch from the imported RFID library to check if the hardware is working properly.
To test the basic functionality of the reader I ran the Dumpinfo which dumps the data contained in an RFID card in HEX format
This is a MIFARE 1KB card which has 16 sector blocks, having operating frequency 13.56MHz.
This is a blank card, the only info here is just for the sector headers and rest of the data is empty. Card UID is the identifying number of a RFID card.
Since the cards I have with me right now are all blank, and contains only the UID, cloning wouldn’t work as there’s no data to clone. In this case, tried out to change the UID of the card to that of a different one.
This didn’t workout unfortunately as the cards are not writable, in order to change the UID of a card sector 0 must be enabled as writable. Might need to buy in new cards which have write access enabled.
Another thing I learned is that you wouldn’t be able to dump data of all cards which have RFID enabled, for example I tried to dump the data of an expired Metro card - the card had PICC complaince implemented which doesn’t allow dumping of the data, you can only view the UID of the card which is pretty much useless for cloning. More info: https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN10834.pdf
