Hackers manage to clone London's Tube Oyster card

Just months after the security of the Mifare chip was reported as being cracked [1], Dutch security researchers managed to catch a free day's worth of rides on the London underground using cloned cards. First, Radboud University researcher Bart Jacobs and his team lifted the cryptographic key off one of the myriad card readers. After the keys were uploaded into a laptop, the team was able to use what essentially was a portable reader to brush up against passengers and silently download the information on their Oyster cards. They then used the data to clone new cards. What many people fail to realize is the vulnerability of most legacy wireless card access systems [2], especially those based on older systems. That Mifare--the de-facto gold standard--is now broken does not bode well.

For more on the Oyster Card hack:
- check out this Wired article [3]