In the USA a court has ordered that three MIT students not talk at DEFCON [1] about their security assessment of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) fare cards [2]. Apparently the court believes that “discussing the flaws at a public conference constituted a ‘transmission’ of a computer program that could harm the fare collection system“, which is pretty sad. There are more documents at Cryptome [3] on the case. Their presentation was to include a cryptanalysis of the Mifare “Classic” card, which takes us to our second case..
Bruce Schneier reports [4] that a group of Dutch researchers have won in court to be able to publish their own cryptanalysis [5] of that very same Mifare Classic card, with the court stating:
Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings.
An outbreak of common sense that the MIT students could only dream of. I wonder if they could appeal and cite this case as grounds to have the judgement overturned ?
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