Hackers of the Boston Transport Authority at Defcon

The three MIT students sued by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority over their talk planned for Defcon on hacking the subway system talk about how they felt when they learned about the suit. The suit was filed days after they met with the MBTA and felt that the issues were resolved.



From AP:


Court blocks MIT students from showing subway hack
By OSKAR GARCIA – 17 hours ago
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A federal judge ordered three college students to cancel a Sunday presentation at a computer hackers' conference where they planned to show security flaws in the automated fare system used by Boston's subway.
The temporary restraining order, issued by a U.S. district judge in Massachusetts, prevented the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from demonstrating at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas how to use the vulnerabilities to get free rides.
The Electronics Frontier Foundation, which is representing MIT students Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa, plans to fight the order, said Jennifer Granick, the group's civil liberties director.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said in a complaint filed Friday that the students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws. MIT is also named in the suit.
But Granick told The Associated Press on Sunday that the students were simply trying to share their research and planned to omit key information that would make things easier for anyone who actually wanted to hack the payment system.
Lawyers for the transit system did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment on Sunday.
Electronic copies of the 87-slide presentation circulating the Internet disparaged the transit system's physical security and showed photographs of unlocked doors, turnstile control boxes and exposed computer monitors at subway stations.
One slide explains that the presentation would teach attendees how to generate fare cards, reverse engineer magnetic stripes on cards and hack radio frequency identification (RFID) cards.
The next slide says: "And this is very illegal! So the following material is for educational use only."
The presentation was distributed to conference attendees on CDs on Thursday, before the conference officially began and the transit system filed suit.
In court documents, Gary Foster, chief technology officer for the transit system said the presentation would "inflict significant damage" if the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority did not have a chance to correct the flaws.
"It is extremely important to maintain the security and integrity of the Fare Media systems," Foster said in a court declaration. "With an insecure, compromised system, even basic revenue controls, to name one example, become significantly challenging."
The MIT students' presentation was supposed to demonstrate hacks for the system's primary two payment cards — CharlieCard and CharlieTicket — which work on the system's subways and buses. The transit system plans to implement the cards' use on its commuter rail, boats and ferries, according to its Web site.
Granick said ordering the students to not share their findings would be "dangerous," and have a chilling effect on legitimate researchers who want to point out flaws that lead to system improvements.
"If you prevent legitimate researchers from talking about their findings, it's not going to stop people from finding vulnerabilities. It's going to stop the good guys from talking about them and from learning from each other," Granick said. "The bad guys are still going to be looking for the vulnerabilities and still be finding them."
Defcon, attended by many of the world's best-known security experts, has become an annual showcase of the latest discovered weaknesses in computers, phone equipment and other machines.
On the Net:
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority: http://www.mtba.com
Defcon conference: http://www.defcon.org
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://www.mit.edu
Electronics Frontier Foundation: http://www.eff.org

Caltech/MIT Forum 2/9/08: The Entrepreneurial Landscape for Developers of Robotics

The Entrepreneurial Landscape for
Developers of Robotics



Saturday, February 9, 2008

Several years ago, Sony demonstrated a corps of bipedal robots that perform a fully-coordinated elegant modern dance. They could do everything but jump, but they needed to be programmed in detail. Last year, a Carnegie-Mellon researcher joined with a Japanese counterpart to produce a toy-sized robot that would move rhythmically on its own to music. Service robots are no longer a fantasy. The Roomba will vacuum your house when you are away and it won’t knock anything over in the process. New high-end cars parallel park themselves. Visions of C3PO may still be a gleam in the eye, but autonomous and semi-autonomous special-purpose devices are no longer limited to laboratory experiments, and no longer limited to government customers and military applications.

Manufacture and sale of heavy duty manufacturing robots is still pretty much limited to industrial giants. What has changed is that there are now opportunities for emerging businesses in the marketplace for smaller scale and more autonomous devices. Much of the market is still wide-open. New companies can develop components, or they can even develop and sell whole assemblies -- provided that they understand their customers and markets, and do not bite off more than they can chew.

The February 2008 session of the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum will look at the entrepreneurial opportunities in the robotics industry, illuminate the market segments and their entrepreneurial profiles, and highlight the kinds of strategic relationships would-be purveyors will need to take their robotics products to market.

Keynote Speaker

The Growing Commercial Markets for Semi-Autonomous Devices
Thomas Paige
Project Engineer
Robotics Special Project
Aerospace Corporation

Panelists

Moji Ghodoussi, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Interface Surgical Technologies, L.L.C.

Wei-Min Shen, Ph.D
Director
Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory
Information Sciences Institute

Rogelio F. Nochebuena
President
Nochebuena R&D

Moderator/Producer

Ira D. Moscatel
Attorney
Arnold & Porter LLP

Co-Producer

Rogelio Nochebuena
President
Nochebuena R&D

Sponsor for this Program



Date
Saturday morning, February 9, 2008

Location
Registration and Continental Breakfast: 8:00 a.m. at Baxter Hall, Caltech
Program: 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Networking: 11:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon at Baxter Hall, Caltech
Directions/Maps: Directions to the Forum; Caltech's Interactive Map

Cost
$40 on-line registration fee. $50 at-the-door. $10 for students with full-time student ID (must show at door); free to Caltech students. Registrations will be accepted on-line up to 5 p.m., Thursday, February 7th. There are no refunds for no-shows.

FOUNDING SPONSORS Caltech Industrial Relations Center
Caltech Alumni Association
MIT Alumni Association



The Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum is administered in
conjunction with Entretech