Most Security Measures Easy to Breach, Expert Says

Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory break into "foolproof" systems

By Phil Rogers
|  Friday, Jan 7, 2011  |  Updated 1:32 PM CST
View Comments ()
|
Email
|
Print
Tweet
Argonne National Laboratory test the security varying from eyeball reading biometric locks to the common GPS system in your car."/>

The Vulnerabilty Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory test the security varying from eyeball reading biometric locks to the common GPS system in your car.

advertisement

When things go really, really wrong, Roger Johnston has a really, really good day.

After all, he's usually the man who made them go wrong.

Johnston has a PhD, 10 patents to his name, and what every 10 year old kid would think is a dream job. As chief of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, he has made it is his mission to crack into every security system labeled as foolproof by their creators.

"We need to be thinking like the bad guy," said Johnston. "The unfortunate reality is that the bad guys get to define the problem. The good guys don't."

Those card readers at your office? Piece of cake, says Johnston. Nothing secures the boxes to the wall. By inserting some simple circuits inside, he can come back days later and play back the code of the last card passed across using only a magnet.

Multimedia

Great Gadget Photos: CES 2011

Related searches:
security weather really national johnston
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.