Breaking The Back End! It Is Not Always A Bug. Sometimes, It Is Just Bad Design!

Reverse engineering is critical to exploitation. However, going through the process of reverse engineering can often lead to a great deal more than just uncovering a bug. So much so that you might find what you need for exploitation even if you don't find a bug. That’s right. If you go through object data, object representation, object states, and state changes enough you can find out quite a lot. Yes. Poor application logic is a bitch. Just ask any application penetration tester. This time it is not the magstripe. It’s appsec and you will get to see how application attacks can be used against a hardware platform. In this talk, I will go through the journey that I took in reverse engineering the public transportation system of an east asian mega-city, the questions that I asked as I wondered “How does this work?”, the experiments that I ran to answers those questions, what I learned that lead me to an exploit capable of generating millions of dollars in fake tickets for that very same system, and how other designers can avoid the same fate. Not without risk, this research was done under a junta so I will also be telling you how I kept myself out of jail while doing it. Please join me. You won’t want to miss it.