Forum Topic

How secure is Oyster?

Just had this from UITP (Intrnational Public Transport organisation):-·      Will your card be safe enough?German and Dutch hackers have broken through a security layer of the Dutch national e-ticketing scheme “ov-chipkaart”. A wave of uncertainty concerning the consequences is rocking the smart world of Public Transport! How does it affect the national roll-out now that new and expert investigations have to be performed; is your privacy left unprotected; has the huge investment been partly lost; how much fraud is acceptable and/or inevitable?Should the simple memory card be replaced by a microprocessor card to increase security on the front-end, or does the back-office need to detect fraud better, or maybe both ...

Chris Veasey ● 6827d1 Comments

The mention of Oyster in the title attracted me to your post, but I then found it failed to mention Oyster at all! "How does it affect the national roll-out ... ?"  - national roll-out of what?  If you mean the national roll-out of Ov-chipkaart in the Netherlands, it may cause them to think again about the disposable unencrypted version of the card, which I think was the one hacked into.  Wikipedia claims that this uses a different chip to Oyster cards which are encrypted."Should the simple memory card be replaced by a microprocessor card to increase security ..."  - yes, and Oyster and Ov-chipkaart are indeed microprocessor cards.

Richard Jennings ● 6825d