Yesterday, the Dutch TV programme “Goudzoekers” featured Saar Drimer and me demonstrating a relay attack against the recently introduced Chip and PIN system in The Netherlands. The video can be found online, in both Windows Media or Silverlight formats as well as Flash below. The production team have published a synopsis (translated version) on their … Continue reading Relay attack featured on Dutch TV
When you transact with an EMV payment card (a “Chip and PIN” card), typical UK operation is for the bank to exchange three authentication “cryptograms”. First comes the request from the card (the ARQC), then comes the response from the bank (the ARPC) and finally the transaction certificate (TC). The idea with the transaction certificate … Continue reading A truly marvellous proof of a transaction
People often ask me what can they do to prevent themselves from being victims of card fraud when they pay with their cards at shops or use them in ATMs (for on-line card fraud tips see e-victims.org, for example). My short answer is usually “not much, except checking your statements and reporting anomalies to the … Continue reading Card fraud — what can one do?
I appeared on “You and Yours” (Radio 4) today at 12.35 with an official from the Financial Ombudsman Service, after I coauthored a FIPR submission to a review of the service which is currently being conducted by Lord Hunt. Our submission looks at three cases in particular in which the ombudsman decided in favour of … Continue reading Financial Ombudsman losing it?
EMV (or “Chip and PIN” as it’s known in the UK) is changing the fraud landscape, no doubt about it. Counterfeit card fraud at POS is down, card theft is down, card-not-present is up, phishing is up, ATM fraud is up. Fraud migrates, we get the picture. But as EMV reaches maximal deployment in the … Continue reading The ATM Protection Racket
The banks are thinking about introducing a new anti-phising meaure called the ‘chip authentication protocol’. How it works is that each customer gets a device like a pocket calculator in which you put your ‘chip and PIN’ (EMV) card, enter your PIN (the same PIN you use for ATMs), and it will display a one-time … Continue reading Yet another insecure banking system
Markus points us to a story on card fraud by German TV reporter Sabine Wolf, who reported some of our recent work on how cards get cloned.She reports a number of cases in which German holidaymakers had cards cloned in Italy. In one case, a sniffer in a chip and PIN terminal at a skilift … Continue reading Growing epidemic of card cloning
Dual use technologies are everywhere. Myself and colleagues have been presenting Phish and Chips, and the Man-in-the-Middle Defence at the Security Protocols Workshop this week, in which we describe how the EMV protocol suite can be modified in unintended ways, and that a card interceptor can be used for both fraudulent and beneficial activities. A … Continue reading Fraud or feature?
Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order. So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not random? You guessed it – all bets are … Continue reading Data ordering attacks
Jurassic Park is often (mistakenly) left out of the hacker movie canon. It clearly demonstrated the risk of an insider attack on control systems (Velociraptor rampage, amongst other tragedies…) nearly a decade ahead of the Maroochy sewage incident, it’s the first film I know of with a digital troll (“ah, ah, ah, you didn’t say … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Vulnerabilities! We’ve got vulnerabilities here! … See? Nobody cares.