Free ride: students crack ticket algorithm - 0 views
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other university students started looking at a public transport's ticketing system because they were fans of public transport and interested in how the data was encrypted. They were also interested in what protections were in place against malicious users creating fake tickets
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they were already aware of the potential flaws, but it was a large and expensive operation to change the tickets
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cryptography should be impossible to crack, even if a potential attacker or reverse engineer knows every detail about how it is implemented. This system on the other hand is relying completely on users not knowing how it is implemented, which may have been fine when it was introduced in the early '90s because much fewer people had access to the technology required to read the tickets, or computers fast enough to analyse the data
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"A team of university students in Sydney have cracked the secret algorithm used on Sydney's public transport tickets for buses, trains and ferries, which they say could allow them to print their own tickets. "