Prox Card Bump Cloning UPDATE 3

The latest bump clone news is the ExxonMobile SpeedPass system used for gasoline has been hacked. Researchers at John Hopkins were able to crack the short 40 bit keys with some semi-custom hardware. There are 6 million potential victims and with gasoline at $2.00 a gallon the risk is clear. These chips are also in use for electronic automobile demobilizers.

It is my opinion that the risk to an automobile owner is much less than that of a SpeedPass holder. To steal the car requires both compromising the physical key and the electronics. To steal gasoline just requires the fake SpeedPass card.

The John Hopkins researchers made a small Quicktime video illustrating Bump Cloning.

The above represents the opinion of George Mallard, P.E.

Copyright 2005, KMS Systems, Inc.
Information current as of April 2, 2005