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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

"The playing cards all have RFID antennas in them" feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech and I guess simplify tracking what's in people's hands? I feel like there would be some sort of computer vision or manual solution for this that wouldn't be so potentially exploitable.

I'm sure they considered this but it fascinates me that they're not doing something like 'when a card is dealt it runs past a scanner' to track who gets what card.

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> feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech

Making unique ids for tracking is not being "high tech". IDs provide traceability, which is protection against unauthorized modification/deletion, which is part of information security, etc.

Casinos live on their reputations of running an honest game. I guess "smart cards" can further that cause. But there's a risk that the opposite can occur.

Couldn't you just have serial numbers on the cards and check them at the end of the hand? Why an antenna that can be read at a distance through obstructions?

The RFID chips are there so that they can show exactly what everyone has during the hand. Televised poker is much more interesting when you know what cards everyone has.

All true, but when A) your entire business model relies on keeping those IDs hidden and B) you’re storing them on intentionally “promiscuous” media (RFID), it definitely increases the attack surface in a big way.

I’m sure this is a calculated risk, they probably feel confident in their ability to detect unauthorized attempts to read the tags.

All the cards have randomized UUID numbers as their IDs, so without matching them to their real value, they're just random numbers on the air.

And when all you can do is sniff all cards at once, you can't do this pairing and read the game.

Sounds, well, sound to me.

They used to require players to put their two cards on a transparent spot of the table so that a camera below could id them for the television feed. RFID is much more secure than this, and it also reduces the times when cards can't be read because the player doesn't play them right.

Putting the cards past a reader or scanner while dealing would alter the flow of the game, and would also introduce other attack vectors.

It's likely there are a lot of counter-measures in place, including software-based protocols as well as frequency monitoring.

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-98/final

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