Chameleon Ultra: a flashdrive sized NFC toolkit | Hacker News Reader

Chameleon Ultra: a flashdrive sized NFC toolkit

github.com

22 pointselisaado10 comments

Too bad there’s no single „this is what this project is” anywhere in the repo description, readme or docs. There’s „X is next generation of Y”, and even the whitepaper goes straight into weeds instead of explaining what the thing is. I tried hard but I still don’t fully understand.

Agreed. From a quick skim (especially of the CLI interface) it looks to be a device to impersonate an NFC card, so you can then put it on a reader (eg. A hotel room door) and try to reverse engineer the handshake.

looks like to be for pentesting. If you look at their affiliates, it's a bit more clear https://lab401.com/collections/pentesting/products/lab401-pe...

But I came here too, to understand what it is about and we are probably just not the audience :-)

Now, I'd be curious to know how good these devices are and/or how insecure these RFID chips are - because 500 USD is quite cheap for a device supposed to impersonate you or open your car or your hotel room.

> 500 USD is quite cheap for a device …

If you type chameleon ultra v3 into the search box on aliexpress, you’ll get results for under 20€.

If you look up v4, you get about the same price as other resellers.

If you don't know what it is based on the limited info in the readme you're not the audience.

damn bro, watch the gatekeeping... what if i want to learn more about it?

Then you read the thorough documentation provided?

> "no single „this is what this project is” anywhere in the repo description, readme or docs. "

That sounds like he read through the docs to me and make a perfectly valid observation that that the maintainers might find valuable. He didn't criticize them for not doing it he just pointed out that it wasn't there. You then told him to RTFM when you didn't seem to spend much time reading what he had written.

If you can't figure out what the project is, while the description says "...card emulation more stable. And gave the chameleon the ability to read, write, and decrypt cards...." then I'm not sure you should be playing with software that can easily cross the line of breaking laws. Grey-hat software like this rarely screams "NFC CRACKER" since it hurts the credibility, is more likely to get it flagged by automated scans, and attracts skids. Look what happened to the flipper...

Also, my comment was in reply to 'What if I want to learn more about it'. RTFM is the objectively correct response, no short description is going to help there. Maybe we have different ideas of what "learn more" means

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