Thesis OV Chipkaart wins Aia Software Master Award

Nijmegen, January 26, 2009 - On Friday 23 January, Aia Software presented awards for the sixth year running for the best theses written by IT students at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Roel Verdult’s thesis on ‘Security analysis of RFID tags’ and Gerhard de Koning Gans’ thesis on ‘Analysis of the MIFARE Classic used in the OV-Chipkaart project’ were joint winners in the master thesis category. His thesis on ‘Reliability of a read-write lock implementation’ won Bernard van Gastel the bachelor thesis award. The jury consisted of lecturers from the IT Faculty at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and representatives of Aia Software.

Master Award

The master theses demonstrated that the OV Chipkaart (a smart card that provides access to public transport) is not entirely protected against copying. This contactless smart card utilises RFID technology, whereby the chip and reading equipment exchange information via radio frequency. Despite various security features employed by the chip it remains possible to eavesdrop on the radio transmission and decipher it. This was demonstrated not just for the OV Chipkaart, but also for all cards with the same MIFARE Classic chip, including many building access systems. Consequently numerous facilities, for example military barracks and university premises, have undergone security upgrades and been issued with additional PIN numbers, as well as other precautions being incorporated into smart cards that use this particular chip in order to make them more secure.

Paul Dirven, Aia Software CEO: “It’s difficult to ignore theses that have made it into the newspapers, TV and even raised questions in parliament. Whilst publicity is a fitting prize for the most appealing thesis, it does not have to stop there. Whilst security shortcomings can often be demonstrated on paper, it doesn’t necessarily imply that an actual practical method of using them has been found. However, Roel and Gerhard succeeded in doing this. The outcome reinforces our vision that software developers, ourselves included, absolutely must seek timely collaboration with Universities on issues of security”.

Bachelor Award

Standard solutions exist for many of the problems in the field of parallelism and concurrency. Some of these solutions have been proven to work satisfactorily and never result in situations where processes interfere with, or wait indefinitely for, each other. For other solutions, however, it is merely an assumption. This was also true of an algorithm for read-write locks, the subject of the bachelor thesis. The algorithm researched is used by a major library (the Trolltech Qt library), which is also used by a huge number of software projects. Model checking was used to demonstrate that the algorithm contains an error. The algorithm was improved and model checking used to confirm that it was error-free. The improvement proposed in the thesis was incorporated in a subsequent version of the library.

Marko van Eekelen, Professor in the IT Faculty and chairman of the jury: “In his thesis, Bernard van Gastel presents a solution to the problem of concurrency of read-write operations in extremely common computer software. His thesis presents an alternative solution where first he uses model checking to show that it is probably error-free, and then he uses a theorem-prover to prove that it is actually error-free. A significant contribution to IT and a fine achievement for a bachelor thesis.”

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