Catonic wrote:

Students that John Hopkins performed a brute-force attack on RFID, only to find out -- tada -- that it's 40 bit encryption. And now shipping on Ford vehicles.

... uhhhhhh, this is rather old news (over 6 months ago). Avi Ruben has since spoken and published quite extensively on this subject, both before and after the date of the article.

He ganged several FPGAs together to do the brute force crack. Yes its cool he actual did it. Yes I am glad that we have actual numbers on how fucking retarded the protection schemes most RFID system use are. But this is nothing new or particularly impressive. Rubin idea is far from original

This is the same thing the EFF did in 1997 (1998?) to crack DES in a day. FPGAs are, in layman's terms, hardware compilers. You layout a circuit using various hardware description languages, and pow, the chip rewires its gates to be that hardware. So things like RFID and DES, which are super fast when implemented in hardware and super slow when implemented in software get cracked very quickly with FPGAs. You can also clock an FPGA an order of magnitude faster than any microprocessor (Power, ARM, MIPS, x86, whatever).

H1kari, the organizer of Toorcon works for a company making devices the size of a stamp to crack various protocols and encryption, using several FPGA cores.