At all the hotels I’ve ever stayed at, I’ve never once encountered one with an access system I trust to protect me, my party, or our belongings. It’s always been trivial to clone NFC access tags or magnetic stripes, the former being the subject of this blog post. It’s for this reason that I’ve always carried such access tags in a shielded wallet or sleeve in order to lower the odds of an opportunistic adversary burgling my belongings, though obviously a truly dedicated adversary has plenty of other avenues to achieve physical access.
I’m currently out traveling and for a variety of reasons, a self-contained mobile travel router setup is desirable for me. This was pretty simple to set up with an off-the-shelf GL.iNet, TracFone, and power bank–with a few gotchas to look out for: while piecing together this setup, I discovered that GL.iNet travel routers were actually incompatible with my TracFone (and I assume a number of other common phones); SSH’ing into the underlying router OS and making some quick configuration changes is all that’s necessary to unblock a blocked phone.