Find Hidden NFC Readers with the New Hunter Cat NFC Security Tool
Emulate, read, write, and communicate between NFC devices with Electronic Cats and Salvador Mendoza's open-hardware board.
Electronic Cats and security researcher Salvador Mendoza have teamed to release their latest creation, the Hunter Cat NFC, which is set to ship soon. The board is a security tool for reading, writing, sniffing, and emulating near-field communication (NFC) devices.
"Specially created to identify NFC readers and sniffing tools, with this tool you can audit, read or emulate cards of different types."
These beautiful yet functional devices contain two key hardware pieces: a SAM D21 processor and an NXP PN7150 NFC controller. The default firmware detects nearby card readers. This mode alone is a great security tool to find hidden NFC readers lurking in the wild. There are three other uses or operating modes for Hunter Cat NFC: card emulation, reader/writer, and peer-to-peer.
The emulation mode is similar to how smartphones can emulate a passive NFC device. When scanned, it'll present itself as whatever device it is emulating. As the name implies, the reader/writer mode helps dump or program a tag. Keep in mind that Hunter Cat NFC cannot force a write on a device with write protection. Peer-to-peer establishes a two-way channel for two NFC-enabled devices. This mode allows the two devices to exchange data with each other.
Since the microcontroller is the SAM D21, there are two popular options for programming it. The first is using the Arduino library. (The SAMD21 is the same processor found in the Arduino Zero.) In fact, the NFC reader scanning example in the Hunter Cat NFC GitHub report is an Arduino-based example. Another option would be to program the device with CircuitPython.
The supported protocol list is very long. Hunter Cat NFC supports NFCIP, ISO 14443, MIFARE, and more. For a complete list, check out the product page.
The GitHub repo contains an Arduino example, KiCad design files, a 3D model, and an example case. You can buy Hunter Cat NFC from Electronic Cats' store for $90 USD with a special pre-order price of $72. Electronic Cats already has the devices on-hand and expects customer shipments to start April 4th, 2021. Boards are available in either black or white.