ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Magstrip Spoofer - Alexander Jin (amjin2 - ECE110), Noelle Crawford (noellec3 - ECE110), Eli Feinberg (elihf2 - ECE120)

Introduction

Statement of Purpose

Our project will be a magstripe reader and spoofer, with the ability to read magstripe type cards and recreate saved patterns. Our end goal is a prototype of what could be a ‘multikey’, a device that can store all your magstripe keys in one, to reduce the amount of cards you need to carry on a daily basis.

Background Research

Since our project will most likely involve fairly complicated circuitry, our group has done some research on similar projects upon which we can base ours[1]. Our project would be an elaboration on this one, we would like to replicate the spoofing ability of this device, but also add the ability for the device itself to read values from cards that it would then be able to store and replicate.

We’re interested in working on this project because as college students, we each have to carry our icards everywhere we go, as well as credit cards and other key cards, such as apartment keys. Our lives could be simplified greatly if all these were able to be combined into a simpler solution.

Design Details

Block Diagram / Flow Chart

System Overview

AT Tiny Microcontroller: This will be the brain of the spoofer, and will tell the bridge what frequency to drive the magnetic coil.

Bridge: This will transmit a signal to the magnetic coil

Magnetic coil: This will produce a signal to replicate the one produced when swiping a magstripe card.

Card reader: We’re not sure how to implement this yet, but we want to read magstripe cards and store the codes in the arduino for future use (spoofing)

Arduino: Take input from the card reader and store magstripe codes, tell the AT Tiny what to do

Parts

Arduino microcontroller

AT Tiny

L293D H-Bridge

Magnetic Coil

Wire

Possible Challenges

Since we’re all fairly inexperienced, we foresee some challenges assembling the circuit correctly. We also need to design our own circuit for the card reader, which is going to require more research, and may be difficult because again, we’re all fairly new to electrical engineering.

References

[1]S. Kamkar, "samyk/magspoof", GitHub, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/samyk/magspoof. [Accessed: 18- Sep- 2020].