The researchers sliced off the minuscule layers of the chip and took photos of each layer. The chip is tiny - about a 1-millimeter-square shred of silicon - and is composed sed of several They examined theĪctual MiFare Classic chip in exacting detail using a microscope and the open-source OpenPCD RFID reader and snapped several in-depth To hack the chip, Nohl and Plotz reverse-engineered the cryptography on the MiFare chip through a painstaking process. 'We will give out further details next year.' 'This is the first public announcement that the Crypto-1 cipher on the MiFare tag is known,' said Nohl in December at the 24C3 talk. In their popular talk at 24C3, punctuated by bursts of raucous applause, Nohl presented an overview of radio frequency identification security vulnerabilities and the process of hacking the MiFare chip's means of encryption, known as the Crypto-1 cipher. Thousands of hackers from far-flung locales converged on Berlin between Christmas and New Year's for a raft of talks and project demonstrations. In December, Nohl and Plotz gave a presentation on MiFare's security vulnerabilities at the 24th Chaos Communications Congress (24C3), the annual four-day conference organized by Germany's notorious hacking collective, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
