Hackers Managed To Open 3 Million Hotel Card Locks in Just Seconds

26.03.2024 - 17:49 / travelpulse.com / North America / Mia Taylor

Your next hotel room stay may not be as secure as you hope it is.

A group of security researchers who were invited to a Las Vegas hotel to identify digital security vulnerabilities discovered a technique that would enable intruders to open “millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps,” according to a new report from Wired.

The team of security researchers, who spoke with Wired, have dubbed the hotel room keycard hacking technique “Unsaflok.”

It is based on what Wired describes as “a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba.”
More than 3 million hotel room doors around the globe, throughout 13,000 properties in 131 countries, use these types of Saflok systems, per Wired.

Hackers are able to exploit weaknesses in keycard's encryption and underlying RFID system, the article goes on to explain.

To engage in this type of hacking, the first step is to simply obtain a keycard from a target hotel by either booking a room or taking a keycard out of a box of used key cards at the hotel.

After that, hackers read code on the card using an RFID read-write device. And then write two keycards of their own.
“When they merely tap those two cards on a lock, the first rewrites a certain piece of the lock's data, and the second opens it,” explains Wired.

“Two quick taps and we open the door,” Lennert Wouters, a researcher from  theComputer Security and Industrial Cryptography group at the KU Leuven University in Belgium, told Wired. “And that works on every door in the hotel.”

Swiss lock maker Dormakaba has been working to address this security problem, says Wired. Since last year, the company has been trying to raise awareness of the problem among hotels globally that rely upon Saflok and help to “fix or replace the vulnerable locks.”

All that’s required to remedy the problem is updating the “front desk management system” and then a technician reprograms each door’s lock throughout the hotel. Though some older locks will still require a hardware upgrade.

The process of remedying this industry challenge however, has not been moving as quickly as one might hope. Apparently only 36 percent of Safloks have been updated as of this month.

“We have worked closely with our partners to identify and implement an immediate mitigation for this vulnerability, along with a longer-term solution,” Dormakaba wrote to WIRED in a statement.“Our customers and partners all take security very seriously, and we are confident all reasonable steps will be taken to address this matter in a responsible way.”

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