Magnetic Stripe Technology and the New York City MetroCard

Presented at HOPE Number Six (2006), July 21, 2006, 1 p.m. (60 minutes)

Curious what's on all those magnetic stripes in your wallet? Learn how magnetic stripes work and how you can use parts from your "junk drawer" to build a simple reader. Joe's reader design is easy to build and is capable of reading proprietary formats that most commercial readers can't. The software, which runs under Linux and requires only a sound card, does most of the work and is easy to tweak. Also included in the lecture will be a discussion about the New York City MetroCard and how its proprietary encoding was reverse engineered with this reader design.

Presenters:

• Joseph Battaglia
  Joseph Battaglia aka "Redbird," is a regular on the Off The Hook radio show and has been involved in the New York City hacker community for several years. Last year, he presented at the European hacker conferences What The Hack! and the Chaos Communication Congress. His interest in technology is diverse and includes the fields of RF engineering, open source software, and security. Joseph currently holds an extra class amateur radio license and is active within the ham radio community. He is working in information security this summer for a Fortune 100 company. Joseph is entering his junior year pursuing an electrical engineering degree at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Links:

• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/HOPE Number Six (2006)/HOPE Number Six (2006) - Magnetic Stripe Technology and the New York City Metrocard.srt (subtitles)
• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/HOPE Number Six (2006)/HOPE Number Six (2006) - Magnetic Stripe Technology and the New York City Metrocard.mp4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSmqwJmKh2E

Similar Presentations:

• GrrCON 2016 / Magnetic Stripes 101
• DEF CON 25 (2017) / Exploiting 0ld Mag-stripe information with New technology
• The Last HOPE (2008) / The New York City Taxi System: Privacy vs. Utility