Computer Scientists Crack Security Token In 13 minutes

Posted on Jul 10, 2012 in Announcement | 0 comments

Computer scientists claim to have found a way to hack the security token which is an employee card that constantly produces changing numbers used by government officials to prove their identity electronically for briefing. This is a highly secure tool for logging into highly sensitive cooperate and government networks. There are four different types of these keys varying in the type of passwords they give. Several attempts have been made to break the token’s security by other individuals and corporations; however their attempts either failed or were too slow. Now computer scientists claim to have found a way to break the common RSA electronic token in a record time of just 13 minutes.

Team Prosecco said they can open gadgets such as the RSA dongle, the securLD800 and many other similar tools produced by different companies. The team published their finding at a cryptography conference. Ars Technica first reported these findings on Monday, June 25. The latter was found alarming by RSA security which is one of the largest job security makers; they said their own scientists are doing a research to determine if these findings are authentic. Research reports of this kind pose a great threat for companies like RSA security and their customers. Their spokesman added that if there is any potential threat of any kind the company will address it pronto. Cryptographers once warned that the standards used in these devices were old-fashioned and exposed to attacks by hackers. These warning did not have much impact as manufactures do not pay much attention to theoretical attacks, however a while later America’s largest military contractor reported that their computer network had been hacked by thieves exploiting a RSA hack which was announced in March of 2011 when the company’s data protection was reported to have been breached.

Although one of the main reasons why this ‘old-fashioned’ standard was being used is that researchers and manufactures had agreed that it would take a long time for a hacker to crack the key so it was in a way absurd. On the contrary the resent discovery made by Team Prosecco has proven that it could take just 13minutes. The research team claim they have created another algorithm that can crack five other security devices. As a conclusion they wrote that the attacks are efficient and they hope the security industry would stop using these security standards. Their research also brought off the record for shortest time to crack a security token compared to 22 minutes to crack a similar device made by Siemens. Other security standards are still considered to be safe for usage, but security companies will have to deal with more agent issues.

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