Hi guys, im currently planning on doing a university project on magnetic strip swipe card technology.
I was thinking of doing something along the lines of hiding data on layers of the card and forensic analysis of recovered cards. However does anyone know exactly what can be done to hide data on the card or how much can be hidden?
Aside from obviously changing plaintext to binary and hiding it in the layersd does anyone know any more complex methods? and also if possible is there any way of hiding images on magnetic cards?
any advice would be appreciated.
is there any way of hiding images on magnetic cards?
A suspect hiding child porn images on a magnetic swipe card- that's got to be a first.
what can be done to hide data on the card or how much can be hidden?
Suppose what you could do is start to look at the protocols swipe cards use to talk to the reader.
some links to try
magnetic stripe decoder http//
some more on hacking swipe cards here http//
You might try researching the info at Magtek. They've been around since the early 70's.
Here's a great link with manuals and brochures that contain quite a bit of information on cards and readers technology
You will find that magstripe cards have very limited capacity by today's standards 3 tracks that can contain up to 226 characters minus control/format characters.
Pay particular attention to the Application and Brochure documents. They provide detailed specifications in very brief documents.
Good luck to you!
thanks for the help so far guys, very useful stuff.
Hmm limited capacity, i guess thats the image idea out the window?
Makes your project that much simpler, eh? 😉
yes a very fair point P
A suspect hiding child porn images on a magnetic swipe card- that's got to be a first.
Very small images, like 1x1 or 2x2 pixels might be possible. roll
Of course you need a 1st class pervert to actually like 'em. 😯
You could also hide some programs, nada comes to mind
http//
wink
P
jaclaz
Mag stripes are pretty limiting. RFID is where all the current research seems to be heading.
How to hack RFID-enabled Credit Cards for $8 (BBtv)
If you plan on looking into RFID or "Prox" cards, HID is a long-time provider.
"Smart" cards are the load-bearing card of today. You might want to focus on those in your project, as they have much greater capacity and could carry the kind of content you mentioned.
HI Mc,
you may be able to "spin" this research………..
Rather than looking to "hide" things , turn your research to "find" things.
Specifically you could 'look' into side-band information, this occurs when a card is re-used, by different people, the old details are recorded over…
you could look at trying to extract the 'old' information, potentially when the cards are "bulk erased" before being thrown away or re-used.