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French security services firm Quarkslab has made an eye-popping discovery: a significant backdoor in millions of contactless cards made by Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group, a leading chip manufacturer in China.

The backdoor, documented in a research paper by Quarkslab researcher Philippe Teuwen, allows the instantaneous cloning of RFID smart cards used to open office doors and hotel rooms around the world.

Although the backdoor requires just a few minutes of physical proximity to an affected card to conduct an attack, an attacker in a position to carry out a supply chain attack could execute such attacks instantaneously at scale, Teuwen explained in the paper (PDF).

Teuwen said he discovered the backdoor while conducting security experiments on the MIFARE Classic card family that is widely deployed in public transportation and the hospitality industry.

The MIFARE Classic card family, originally launched in 1994 by Philips (now NXP Semiconductors), are widely used and have been subjected to numerous attacks over the years.

Security vulnerabilities that allow “card-only” attacks (attacks that require access to a card but not the corresponding card reader) are of particular concern as they may enable attackers to clone cards, or to read and write their content, just by having physical proximity for a few minutes. Over the years, new versions of the MIFARE Classic family fixed the different types of attacks documented by security researchers.~~