Chip and Pin is Broken (Credit Card Security Issue)
lightbluetouchpaper.org
lightbluetouchpaper.org
As noted by Frank Stajano, it is amazing the comment by "the UK Cards Association (02:06 in the video clip) that the method will never present a real threat to our customers’s cards because… drum roll… it requires possession of a customer’s card.
A bit like going from “it would be very hard for a thief to steal your card AND at the same time figure out your PIN in 3 tries or less” to “it would be very hard for a thief to steal your card”."
"To: ukcrypto[at]chiark.greenend.org.uk Subject: New paper, and a Newsnight story tonight - Chip and PIN is Broken Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:12:27 +0000 From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson[at]cl.cam.ac.uk>
There should be a 9-minute film on Newsnight tonight showing some research by Steven Murdoch, Saar Drimer, Mike Bond and me. We demonstrate a middleperson attack on EMV. This explains how stolen chip and pin cards can be used by criminals without knowledge of the pin.
The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a pin, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-pin. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a pin of 0000 (or anything you want). We did so, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say "Verified by PIN".
Our technical paper "Chip and PIN is Broken" has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the top conference in computer security. It can be found at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/n...
while the FAQ is at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/n...
and the press release at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/n... "