Karsten Nohl spoke today at Prof. Yoshi Kohno’s weekly UW Security group lunch. The topic of the talk was “The (Im)possibility of Hardware Obfuscation”. In the talk, Karsten described the impracticality of hardware obfuscation techniques with a focus on the recent OV-chipkaart hack in which he played a key role. He also emphasized that it was quite feasible to reverse engineer Mifare Classic and similar hardware with a small budget and readily available tools (e.g. polishing paper, a microscope, Matlab).

Also in attendance were Starbug (Jan Krissler) from the CCC in Berlin and 3ric Johanson, a Seattle-area security professional, RFID hacker, and member of Shmoo. The presentation and discussion were great! A video of a similar talk which Karsten gave at Google can be found on his homepage: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~kn5f/