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Recent talks: Chip & PIN, traffic analysis, and voting

July 6th, 2007 at 11:39 UTC by Steven J. Murdoch

In the past couple of months, I’ve presented quite a few talks, and in the course of doing so, travelled a lot too (Belgium and Canada last month; America and Denmark still to come). I’ve now published my slides from these talks, which might also be of interest to Light Blue Touchpaper readers, so I’ll summarize the contents here.

Two of the talks were on Chip & PIN, the UK deployment of EMV. The first presentation — “Chip and Spin” — was for the Girton village Neighbourhood Watch meeting. Girton was hit by a spate of card-cloning, eventually traced back to a local garage, so they invited me to give a fairly non-technical overview of the problem. The slides served mainly as an introduction to a few video clips I showed, taken from TV programmes in which I participated. [slides (PDF 1.1M)]

The second Chip & PIN talk was to the COSIC research group at K.U. Leuven. Due to the different audience, this presentation — “EMV flaws and fixes: vulnerabilities in smart card payment systems” — was much more technical. I summarized the EMV protocol, described a number of weaknesses which leave EMV open to attack, along with corresponding defences. Finally, I discussed the more general problem with EMV — that customers are in a poor position to contest fraudulent transactions — and how this situation can be mitigated. [slides (PDF 1.4M)]

If you are interested in further details, much of the material from both of my Chip & PIN talks is discussed in papers from our group, such as “Chip and SPIN“, “The Man-in-the-Middle Defence” and “Keep Your Enemies Close: Distance bounding against smartcard relay attacks”

Next I went to Ottawa for the PET Workshop (now renamed the PET Symposium). Here, I gave three talks. The first was for a panel session — “Ethics in Privacy Research”. Since this was a discussion, the slides aren’t particularly interesting but it will hopefully be the subject of an upcoming paper.

Then I gave a short talk at WOTE, on my experiences as an election observer. I summarized the conclusions of the Open Rights Group report (released the day before my talk) and added a few personal observations. Richard Clayton discussed the report in the previous post. [slides (PDF 195K)]

Finally, I presented the paper written by Piotr Zieliński and me — “Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries”, which I previously mentioned in a recent post. In the talk I gave a graphical summary of the paper’s key points, which I hope will aid in understanding the motivation of the paper and the traffic analysis method we developed. [slides (PDF 2.9M)]

Entry filed under: Banking security, Electronic voting, Privacy technology