Friday, December 21, 2007

Scrambling Keypad Security

I was trying to enter the Computer Science building today through the back door near SAC (the one where there is no door knob towards the outside - I know it sounds lazy and desperate, but I was doing it just for kicks) and I came across this locked door with a keypad lock. Now I am super skeptical where keypads are concerned but this one truly intrigued me. I have read about these scrambling keypads but never used one. The idea is that for every attempt the keypad scrambles the key-number assignment. The motivation is to prevent the trivial talcum powder attacks (which don't always work, e.g. if the keys are made of high quality matte rubber) or the more advanced thermal imaging attack.

But, then, the s-keypad might not provide adequate security as well. If you think for a while, the strength of the lock boils down to how good an RNG it has, which - I believe - is a very interesting problem to look at. Go to the first link. There you can download the datasheet for the lock. I quickly scanned it and my guess is that they are using the user input to generate new random numbers. Can this feature be exploited in creating a suitable attack ? Do comment.

1 comment:

Nikhil said...

dude, don't play with security and get some work! remember this line "don't taze me bro". well, about the RNG, if they using some reasonable hash function with a random salt like clock (together with your user input), my guess is that you will have a good time breaking it.