see subject.
Been watching the first episodes of Season 1 of 24, a spy thriller new to me which I, for one, think could be very popular. Tons of encrypted juicy bad-guy data smuggled in.
Ref this: Digital card - Wikipedia
If the data was recorded using the standards typically used for bank cards & such, the capacity is just a couple hundred bytes.
If you’re positing the bad guys are using non-standard custom hardware to read & write the cards, then they could also be making fake cards which look like common magstripe cards but really have multiple embedded SIM chips or Star Trek memory stores or … in them.
IOW once it’s non-standard, the limit is essentially the limit of modern tech of any kind for real-world applications or the limit of the authors’ imagination for fiction.
As someone that has had many interactions card key systems; contrary to what the conspiracy tin hatters say. The key from your hotel room has usually only the following “personal secret info” on it:
Room Number, date the key was made, the user that made the key, time the key was made, number of keys made, and how long in minuets the key is good for. that’s it…
Some of you might be asking but how does the staff seem to know who i am at a casino or on a cruise ship??? Well they have a device on the register that reads the cards room number and that interfaces with the PMS. The PMS ( computer system that in really simple terms “runs” the hotel.)
Now if you found a key out on the street and had your own card reader ( like the kind people the steal CC numbers have) you might would see some thing like this:
0233.02232015.0078.211135.02.1440 ( actually more likely all in ones and zeros format, so it would look like this:10101001101000100101011111111000101010)
the code translates to:
RM 233. feb.23,2015.09:11:35pm. 0078(user id number) 2 keys made, the key is good for 1440 minuets (24 hours).
I could go on about some of the more technical aspect of how the keys work if you want… like how the hotel can read the lock to see who’s key opened the door and when…or why your key stops working and you are staying for 3 nights and it is only the second night …and stuff like that…
-
What’s the magnetic limit for the strip on the card? I don’t know the words off hand for the complicated technologies involved in the goal of ever greater magnetic packing for disk design, and obviously x magnetic medium needs x reader, but I’m assuming the strip on that card is industry wide and must have some specs.
-
What’s PMS stand for here?
-
Dibs on music jokes; I did a paper in grad school on the bizarre–to many–final movement of the Mozart Quintet in G Minor, and dabbled in Classical genre and form histories. But I’m paused in episode 8, and I gotta get back, so I’ll yield pride of place.
Back in a bit…
ETA: no time to read the Wik cite…
Property management system also known as a PMS is a software application used to “run” the hotel, its basic objectives are coordinating the operational functions of front office, sales and planning etc. Automate hotel functions like guest bookings, guest details, online reservations, point of sale, telephone, accounts receivable, sales and marketing, banquets, food and beverage costing, materials management, HR and payroll, maintenance management, quality management and other amenities. Hotel property management systems may interface with central reservation systems and GDS ( Expedia, Hotels.com, and Orbitz etc…) and revenue or yield management systems, front office, back office, point of sale, door-locking, housekeeping optimization, pay-TV, energy management, payment card authorization and channel management systems.
oddly enough the programs…they get Premenstrual syndrome once a month too… when they run end of month server maintenance and backup routines
If you really want to make a guest have a bad day… use their credit card as the key…:eek:
way back in the day (15 years ago) i was a front-desk super at a hotel in Winston Salem NC and one of my underlings got so flustered at a guest and accidentally put the guys AMX card in the key card maker… it made that card the key for the lock…
umm the good old days…
A 440 right?
I mean minutes 1440 is how many minutes in 24hours, the key card systems put the time in minutes because you can “rent” by the minute at some hotels if you know how to ask…:p:p:p
One minute for a minuet is a pretty fast piece.
Why not encode an IP address and the decryption key to the spy data store on a server somewhere?
A hotel card isn’t going to contain a whole lot of data. Really, just enough for one code; a handful of bytes.
However, the card in 24 was more like an electronic identification card. Presumably it also contained things like pictures, fingerprints, and so on. So a closer analogy might be something like a biometric passport. According to the link, these have room for several 15 kB images, so we might guess around 100 kB total. More than enough for lots of incriminating evidence (especially anything text-based).