Break Me If You Can: Exploiting PKO and Relay Attacks in 3DES/AES NFC
Summary
A security research paper analyzes vulnerabilities in widely used NFC tags (MIFARE Ultralight C/AES and NTAG 223/224 DNA), showing relay-based and partial-key-overwrite attacks can dramatically reduce key space and enable key recovery under certain configurations. It offers practical mitigations, discusses real-world deployments, and provides PoC tools on GitHub, highlighting the importance of proper configuration, integrity checks, and migration to DESFire EV3 for higher security in access control and hospitality systems.