Surveying the security of access systems in Uppsala, Sweden

Today, many people use several access systems on a daily basis without paying attention to the fact that many of the technologies in use are obsolete and insecure. For example, there are published attacks against all generations of MIFARE Classic cards and cloning a MIFARE Ultralight card is trivial. In this paper, we look into the security of several access systems in a student town Uppsala in Sweden. We evaluate the security of the cards or tags used for access as well as some of the security of the systems themselves. We present a detailed report on the configurations, including any vulnerabilities, while also presenting attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities, as well as real-life examples of how these attacks can be dangerous to the end user. We compare these systems to a well-designed system in the same city and suggest fixes for all vulnerabilities we found. When presenting the potential fixes, we pay attention to the ease and cost of the fixes.