Cut a couple of wires, insert a small, easy-to-make device between them, and you can walk right through all those supposedly card-protected locked office doors.
At the Defcon security conference over the weekend, a hacker and Defcon staffer who goes by the name Zac Franken showed off how a small homemade device he calls Gecko can perform a classic man-in-the-middle attack on the type of access card readers used on office doors around the country.
What's more, making a Gecko is easy and cheap. Franken says the hardware costs about $10.
According to Franken, the hack subverts the Wiegand protocol, commonly used for communication between the card reader and the back-end access control system... (more)
