Is Your RFID Card BROKEN or Does it Just SUCK?

I mean, let's be honest, at some point there's almost no difference between "this item is unusable because it is hopelessly broken" versus "this item is unusable because it is of such low quality that i can't spend the time and effort necessary to make it work."

I have been on a journey recently when it comes to all kinds of RFID cards from all kinds of vendors and I wanted to share a few tips with you along with some tricks and methods for trying to figure out the age-old question: "Am I doing something wrong, or is this RFD card just a piece of crap?"

Enjoy! 👍😁👍

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[advenzy]

`hf tune --bar` if you want a nice graphical bar `hf tune --mix` if you want the bar and voltage readout. An additional issue that we have seen lately with T55 is that there is a batch of chips that have blocks 3-6 locked. EM only takes 2 blocks and will work but things that take 3+ blocks (like HID Pro) will have issues.

[olenilsen]

11:13 - I really appreciate how patient you can be with some customers. I´m a bit of noob with a lot of digital solutions, and one of these days it will be me asking a "dumbass" question like that. I just love how you approach anything as weird as that, it must seem so blatantly obvious to you, and most people in your place might just start to abuse the ignorant buyer with all the tech terms for how he/she might have done something wrong. I know this is the case for a lot of retailers where I live in a lot of matters when it comes to IT solutions. So thank you for addressing every problem in the way you do, it is a very pleasant approach to a problem which a lot of people could learn from.

[billyleask]

I love the analogy of the uncut key. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", but your explanation made it a little less mystical.

[roadrunner]

Love this. Thank you for going over this.

I got a proxmark easy and I'm having a hard time getting started / learning. Glad you're talking about it.

[ghammer]

Thanks to your advice on cards, I have successfully broken mine. I appreciate the reassurance that helped me gain the confidence to break them

[NfxNet]

For any of the RF electronics nerds out there, you can make antennas for a vector network analyzer to measure the resonant frequency and Q of suspected RFID transponders. Even a nice and affordable little NanoVNA will work. You'll need to make different coils for LF vs. HF transponders. The signal dip is really small, so you'll generally need to mess with the display scaling and use averaging to hide the noise. It hadn't occurred to me to use the tune mode in a Proxmark to detect the presence of a transponder, and I think this is brilliant! For UHF transponders, I've had better luck coupling capacitively than magnetically.

[NaoPb]

Good point. I haven't been working with these yet since I have yet to find a use for them in my daily life. But it's always good to keep in mind that some are a waste of time if they are bad quality.

[morrisonghost]

Thanks for another really cool video, when I used to work security I had to deal a lot with “my card is broken” complaints, and one of the things we had to start using as a blanket statement is “the antenna is broken”. I’m just curious if anyone knows if that’s a thing, a lot of pepole were bending the cards like crazy becuase they for some reason liked to push and rub instead of tap, so I figured it was at least possible. Thanks again for another cool video and everything you do

[iWhacko]

I can understand the customer who couldn't enroll the cards, because a lot of cards, or key fobs come preprogrammed with some data right from the factory. Especially the ones you get from AliExpress. I haven't had terrible experience with those cards though, not even the magic Mifare ones.

[eriequiet]

Funny story about the I’ve found a lot of EM readers will fart open when presented with that uid…
Memory error, or some kind of terrible factory test uid, but most can’t be removed

[KateGrayCode]

With HF cards, not even the same silicon is a guarantee of identical performance. Besides the differences in antennas and antenna manufacturing (there are a few different ways to assemble the cards), there are a number of settings on modern silicon (especially NXP) that can affect card performance in terms of range and speed. Configuring cards to be faster can come at an expense in terms of reliability and speed.

[cvt]

nice video, the proxmark looks like a really nice utility, I wonder if there's a more budget reader/writer for getting into RFID testing.

[the-d-r]

Thank you a lot for this video. I have a HF Chip in my hand, that stopped working. I didn't know, that Proxmark has the ability for continuous scan and the tune option. I will try it out tonight.

[gravity]

The cards issued by my bank (Westpac, one of the 4 major banks in Australia) totally suck. I have had to re-order the card several times. (It's not a storage issue, they suck when I get them).

[matthewsabin]

Thanks - I always learn something when I watch your videos

[sunshaker]

Well this explains what is going on with the door at work. The company got new door locks and new cards and of course there were problems. The new cards barely read, so I'm thinking they bought a bunch of cheap cards. This has resulted in a security weakness, as everyone knows the swipe doesn't work most times, if they are inside and near the door they will just open it for people. I'd like to say they limit it to people they know, but we have a bunch of new hires, so effectively it is anyone. All the Pen Testers out there it might be worth checking the quality of the cards the company issues, because if they are crap cards, security will be weak around them. Security Admins buy good cards or your employees will find ways to avoid using the crap ones.

[Nathaniel_Belles]

As a tinkerer looking to get into more RFID tools, the Proxmark is kind of a steep investment. Do you have any recommendations of tinkering hardware for people who want to start out but can’t yet justify the price of a Proxmark? Thanks and keep the RFID content coming!

[yeetyeet]

I wish I had a proxmark or access to one. At our uni, we use rfid cards, and we are pretty sure that it uses an older mifare protocol that is susceptible to replay attacks or more. We could potentially literally get a free lunch.

[thelockpickinglebowski]

Good to know. This is one area that I'm not familiar with.

[DaKink]

Good stuff, looks like a great toy to play around with as well. I need to find more of these things in Europe.