Monday, July 02, 2007

Students discover software security error in public transport tickets

Interesting news from the Amsterdam University where students in the open source project checked if the disposable contactless public transport ticket (OV Chipkaart) could be used again. And yes, the secutiry was insufficient and it was possible...

The breach was reported to Translink and proved to be valuable. Also the education programme itself proved once again the usefulness of open source and independent public evaluation of software. The research was done in the OS3 programme, where OS3 stands for Open Standards, Open Software (which extends Open Source) and Open Security. Together these three components define Open Technology.