Australian Transport Card - Go Card (Queensland/Brisbane) support

[andymac4182]

Hi,

Not sure how but it would be great if support for the Go Card was added. Not sure exactly how to do this? If someone could either add support or let me know how to that would be great. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_card

Kind Regards,
Andrew

I also would love to have support for the Go Card. Would be interesting! :)

I too am interested in the support of the Translink's Go Card, as I aim to replace my wallet with my phone.

Not much of programmer here, but I'm sure I could be helpful in other areas -- scenario logging, testing..

[juanmackie]

Could we please get this going , I emailed the Dev from fare bot and he pointed me here

[micolous]

The Go card is an encrypted Mifare Classic (MF1S50). This means you will need to break the key in use on the cards before you can read anything off it. You can reproduce this problem by running NXP TagInfo and attempting to dump the card. It will show you that all the sectors are locked.

As it is a Mifare Classic tag, you will only be able to read it on phones with NXP's NFC chip (like the Galaxy Nexus and S3). Phones with a Broadcom NFC chip won't read it (like the Nexus 4 and Galaxy S4). See: http://www.andytags.com/nfc-tags-compatibility-issues.html

tl;dr: This is much harder than you think, and maybe you should send the developer a Go Card to start? :)

Disclaimer: I don't live in Brisbane, scanned a friend's card when I was over there a couple of years ago.

[andrewpollock]

I believe I have a decrypted dump of a Go card, if it's of any help with the task, I can make it available. I'm also prepared to put a bounty on this feature request.

[juanmackie]

@andrewpollock I too will add some $$ to the bounty !

[micolous]

I recently visited Brisbane (again), and now have two Go cards (Card A and Card B), and a third which belonged to someone else (Card C). Cards A and C I was able to break the keys on. Card B I was not able to break the keys on. Each card has different keys for each sector of each card.

Unfortunately Card A is expired, and I don't know the balance of it, and Translink's website is not helpful in getting this information. I made detailed records for Card B, but have been unable to access the data on the card. Card C I do not have transaction logs for.

This is the state of play:

• Go cards have unique keys for every card as a (secret) function of their UID and their sector number. This function is unknown, but the key is breakable by other methods. No two cards have the same keys.
• Go cards have no open sectors on the card. You must break the keys for each card in order to read them. This means it's support will be like the other cards which require keys loaded in.
• This itself wouldn't be a problem, because of "mfcuk" and "mfoc", which take about 1.5 hours per card to break Mifare Classic keys. The hardware for this costs 40 USD plus USB-UART adapter and shipping. mfcuk is quite tedious to get running.
  • Before looking at the Go card, I never bothered to purchase hardware that can be used for key breaking. This has opened up many possibilities with working with the other, "easier" cards.
• Unfortunately, Mifare Classic has a new series of card which fixes the "mfcuk" exploit vector. Translink seem to have rolled these out starting somewhere between April and July 2015. I think the way you can easily tell is the "Light Rail" icon on the reverse side has been added for Go cards.

What this means for you, the end user:

• In their current state, Go cards will not be "universally readable" any time soon. You will need to break the keys on your card, this means buying or borrowing the hardware from someone else. You can't use your phone to do this.
• As post-April 2015 cards proliferate, these will be resistant to key attacks, until a new attack is made. Only old cards can have the keys broken.
• I have some support for Go cards in my branch micolous/farebot@gocard, but this is not in a nice state (and not in the Play Store version). This requires encryption keys. I can read the card number. I can't make a lot of meaningful progress on Go cards, so I'm going to prioritise other, easier cards.

If you have complete dumps of the card that you've made with mfoc and a transaction log of what is on that card, I can use this information to improve the decoder. Without this information I'm currently stuck.