Millions of hotel room locks vulnerable to cheap-kit exploit

Around 3 million doors protected by popular keycard locks are thought to be vulnerable to security flaws that allow miscreants to quickly slip into locked rooms. Security researchers developed an exploit that applies to various Saflok keycard locks made by Swiss security company dormakaba, ones that are prevalent in hotels around the world, as well as properties of multiple occupancy. The researchers who worked on the exploit, dubbed "Unsaflok," said more than 3 million hotel locks across 131 countries are affected. Lennert Wouters, Ian Carroll, rqu, BusesCanFly, Sam Curry, sshell, and Will Caruana reported the vulnerabilities to dormakaba in September 2022 and disclosed them this week. Saflok MT and Saflok RT Plus are the most common models people may have encountered on their travels, although all locks using the Saflok system are vulnerable – these include door locks, and the keycard readers used in elevators and parking garages. A keycard from the property an intruder wants to break into is required to pull off the attack. This could be a valid card such as one issued to the intruder's own hotel room, or even an expired one swiped from the express checkout deposit bin. From there, two cards would need to be created – one to rewrite the data on the lock and another to open it, the researchers explained to Wired. This could all be done using commercially available equipment, including a Flipper Zero or even an NFC-capable Android phone, and a few MIFARE Classic cards. It wo...