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Chip & PIN Terminal Playing Tetris
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jan 08, 2007 11:05 AM
from the the-joy-of-subversion dept.
from the the-joy-of-subversion dept.
Fearful Bank Customer writes "When British banks introduced the Chip-and-Pin smartcard-based debit and credit card system three years ago, they assured the public it was impervious to fraud. However, the EMV protocol it's based on requires customers to type their bank account pin number into store terminals in order to make any purchase. Security researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory derided the system as insecure at the time, as it gave access to customer's bank account pin numbers to every store they bought from. Despite these objections, the system was deployed, so researchers Steven Murdoch and Saar Drimer recently modified a straight-off-e-bay chip-and-pin terminal to play Tetris, with a video on YouTube, demonstrating that devices are neither tamper-resistant nor tamper-evident, and that even students with a spare weekend can take control of them. The banks are claiming that this can be reproduced only "in the laboratory" but seem to have missed the point: if customers have to type their bank account pin into every device they see, then the bad guys can capture both critical card information *and* the pin number for the bank account, leaving customers even more vulnerable than they were under the old system."
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Chip-and-Pin Vulnerable To Subtle Trickery 64 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Cambridge University researchers, in an investigation for BBC Television's Watchdog programme, have demonstrated a man-in-the-middle attack for the chip-and-pin credit card security system used throughout the UK and Europe. In the attack, the card is inserted into a card-reader that has been tampered with, and the information transmitted in real-time to an accomplice who uses a specially modified card to make a higher-value purchase elsewhere. The modified card-reader shows only the expected amount, but the larger amount is deducted from the victim's bank account. It would not be easy to use this method in practice because the two transactions must be made simultaneously. The same team recently demonstrated a hacked chip-and-pin terminal playing Tetris."
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to misquote Franklin... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
Hold on a sec here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hold on a sec here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The point being... (Score:5, Interesting)
My vision has always been a smart device with a crypto engine, that provides it's own display and entry. It would plug into POS equipment, and tell the POS equipment at first, only enough to identify itself and tell the POS which financial institution to contact.
The financial institution would receive from the merchant the account holders ID number and some info about the transaction (i.e. the amount, maybe an interval if a service, maybe a tolerance if a repeating service charge). The financial institute would look up the customer's public encryption key, and use it to encrypt all that data together with a challenge string, and send that back to merchant.
Merchant relays the encrypted package to the customer smart device. The device then (maybe using a passphrase to decode private key like a pin, but not linked to anything outside the device) uses the private key to decode the data, and display to user what the financial institution thinks the merchant is asking for with a confirmation. If user confirms details, the decrypted challenge is sent to POS and the merchant relays it to Financial institute.
Financial institute upon receipt of a correctly decoded challenge, authorizes the transaction, and gives the merchant an affirmative response with an authorization code that is *only* valid for that specific transaction.
Here, the financial institute *only* has the customer private key, so ripping off that database won't give anyone access to the account. The merchant knows they are getting the money, but isn't left with anything they *could* use to get more money than the customer authorizes directly. The only place that has the private key is the customers smart card, which should *never* allow it to be transferred out (probably should be generated by the card and only the public part uploaded when issued). If using a passphrase for storage of the private key, it even has resistance to physical theft.
For bonus points (actually, I would pretty much demand it), have it somehow able to plug into usb ports for online transactions. Of course, online, the customer and financial institute can talk directly, simplifying some of it, but the model need not be changed much for online stuff). Again, the PC would never get the private key, so you would have to use the device.
I would *pay* an upfront charge to help cover the cost of the device in exchange for such security. If it's half-assed and uses merchant display/entry, or shares the private key *ever* theoretically, I wouldn't.
Parent
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My idea.... (Score:3, Insightful)
My thoughts are that after you swipe your card, the terminal should give YOU a PIN number that should match a PIN that the bank sends you with your card. At this point, once you verify that it is indeed legit, you provide your counterpart PIN.
And since it doesn't have to be entered, it could be a word, or with LCDs, even an image.
Hell, for that matter,
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Re:Hold on a sec here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Question: what role does the 'chip' have? Does it have any way of securely authenticating the transaction with the merchant, and thus in some way verifying that the merchant trusts the terminal? The article summary suggests that the same old information is on the mag strip.
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There are some fraud problems. Mostly, people hook up card cloners to ATMs and have a small camera set up to record pin numbers. Then again, they also do that in the US, as well.
If entering your PIN at the store is a significant vulnerability, it's one that has existed here for 10 years without significant
Re: (Score:2)
(*yeah, ok, very difficult!)
I wrote Tesco's system you should all listen to me (Score:5, Informative)
Whether you should listen to me or not is another matter.
The chip controls the transaction. That's how it goes. The chip decides if it can trust the terminal or the bank based on cryptographic signing operations. The terminal is verified by a process in which it concatenates various pieces of data, performs a crypto op on them and presents the result to the card. The card compares this to its own result (depending on the card it either has one precalculated and uses the same one each time (low security) or does the same calculation itself on a set of data including some session data (better security)).
PIN is encrypted as soon as it is entered and should never leave the device it's entered on in plaintext form, it is presented to the card as a cryptogram for validation.
When a transactioon is presented to the bank for authorisation it is presented with yet another cryptogram so that the bank can validate the card. The response also comes in the form of a cryptogram so that the card can validate the bank.
However, I'll agree, all this is pretty useless if someone can get inside the terminal and intercept the PIN at hardware level. Other than that and the looking-over-shoulder social security hole problem, EMV's pretty bullet proof. Your PIN doesn't ever even get to the PC that's running the transaction.
If you want to know more then the actual standards are available at EMVco [emvco.com], but they're the nearest thing to legalese I've ever encountered as a software Dev. I'm out of the payments game now, but my knowledge should still be pretty relevant, I hope.
Parent
Re:I wrote Tesco's system you should all listen to (Score:3, Insightful)
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They got it to play tetris by replacing the majority of the electronics inside it.
That really can't be mentioned enough. Link to The Register's article [theregister.co.uk]
It'd be like skinning a copy of Windows 95 to look like Xwindows, and then saying "Look at all the vulnerabilities I found in linux!"
Except that a better analogy is those card skimmer devices that get stuck on ATMs that can record the card stripes and button presses. While the blame is misplaced ("oh noes! teh phish n chipz n pinz r haxx0r3d!"), it's still important as a reminder that sometimes you don't need to hack the security, if simply wearing a sheep's skin is good enough to get your wolf into the flock.
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Card and PIN security (Score:5, Informative)
The potential security problem here is caused by the use of the same PIN for two purposes. You know how you should never use the same password for multiple security-critical systems? Well, that's exactly what some of the UK banks did.
See, EMV security is designed around the assumption that only the card and cardholder know the card PIN. The bank doesn't know it. The merchant terminals see it, but it has no value without the card. In particular, it should be of no use with the bank machine/ATM network.
How then, do you use a bank machine? Well, ideally, you insert your card, enter your PIN to unlock the card, and then the card performs a cryptographic authentication with the bank over the ATM network to identify and authenticate you so you can proceed to perform your transaction. But that requires the ATMs and network to be updated to support the chip card and to use the new authentication protocol.
The other method, of course, is just to use an account number and a PIN, just as you always have, but that PIN *must* be known by the bank's systems, which leads to the banks' dilemma when deploying the system. Their options were:
So, the banks mostly took option 3. I think some of them allow customers to request that their card and ATM PINs be "decoupled".
In theory, this means a malicious merchant can modify their PIN pad to capture the PINs and account numbers, and can then use the information to drain the accounts through the ATM network. In practice, this form of fraud hasn't happened, and it would be fairly easy to track unless the fraudster didn't steal very much -- a pattern of fraud on accounts whose cards have all been used at a particular merchant would be pretty easy to detect.
It could happen, of course, and probably will someday. If it becomes sufficiently serious, then maybe banks will have to abandon PIN synchronization. Hopefully, by then the rest of the world will have caught up and the ATM PIN can be discarded entirely.
Re:Card and PIN security (Score:4, Informative)
EMV cards have two data items for the PIN usually called online PIN and offline PIN but pretty much all banks have the same value for each.
The key worry about this 'attack' is that the electronics could be changed easily:
This fraud has already been perpetrated at a Shell garage in the UK [bbc.co.uk] when a bloke in overalls came into the Shell store to say he was the engineer to check the Chip n PIN device. The Trintech unit had a fault so that it would not self destruct when opened and a simple memory chip was added to the device. The bloke in overalls went back a few weeks later to 'check everything was OK' and took back the memory chip and had the card details and PINs - resultant fraud loss was GBP 1m; although not sure how much was recovered.
I'm very wary of Tesco stores (UK) that swipe the mag stripe before inserting the card into a chip reader then ask the customer for the PIN - they effectively have the strip and the PIN which is enough to make a new card. The problem is that the chip cards have the legacy mag stripe to work in foreign ATMs and non-chip compliant stores.
The way things are going with APACS CAP - punters will be inserting their PIN into any old keypad, so it'll be getting worse before it gets better.
rd
Parent
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Yes it does. It happened to my brother and to his wife. The experiences
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Interesting. I hadn't heard of any actual cases, but I haven't been doing EMV stuff for the last couple of years, so it's not surprising that I've missed it.
Even with a little of this going on, the net effect is still to tremendously reduce overall credit card fraud. The bad part is that because this fraud is rare, the suspicion tends to fall more heavily on the card holder, especially card holders that don't have a solid reputation.
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This way, the payer is reasonable certain that the PIN device has not been modified.
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Yes, there are various implementations of cards with built-in PIN pads, and even other authentication technologies like fingerprint scanners, but none of them have been deployed because of the costs and questions about reliability.
What may be the "next big thing" is called Near Field Communications and involves embedding a contactless smart card chip in a cellphone. With that architecture, the phone's keypad can be used as the PIN pad.
The team's next hack... (Score:5, Funny)
Frequency of I tetrominoes (Score:3, Interesting)
...will be a modification to Tetris to make that damn straight-line block appear more often.
Tetris brand games since Tetris Worlds [tetrisconcept.com], including Tetris DS, already have this modification: the I tetromino is guaranteed to appear once in every group of 7 tetrominoes [tetrisconcept.com]. Thus, if you have one group with the I at the start and one with the I at the end, the longest drought you can get is 12. The more even distribution makes it possible to keep your stack low arbitrarily long [tetrisconcept.com].
Payment Card Industry Standards (Score:2)
Tetris on machine no evidence of tampering? (Score:2, Funny)
I think putting Tetris on the machine makes it pretty obvious that it has been tampered with.
Living in Britain... (Score:2)
While retailers could hack their terminal to swipe PINs, they would
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Try shopping in sainsburys, they swipe the card in their own machine then get you to enter the pin number in the chip and pin thingy.
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Sainsburys have the same policy, but haven't crippled their pin-pads, so if you just ignore the cashier trying to grab your card, and put into the pin-pad instead, it works fine.
The real problem (Score:3, Interesting)
The real problem I see here is that new technology is presented as "unbreakable" then allows the business interests to ignore victims of fraud. In the U.S. we've already seen this happen with the special chipped keys for new vehicles. The auto makers insisted the technology was unbreakable, and the insurance companies responded in kind by denying theft claims from those victims unfortunate enough to have purchased a vehicle with one of these chipped keys.
I'm sure the banks are ready to further punish any victims of this broken "unbreakable" bank card system. I'm not British, so I don't know how applicable this is in the UK, but I imagine it is still a problem.
liability shifty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
With the original swipe system, the liability was with the bank; If you got frauded, then the bank had to re-emburse you. With the introduction of chip and pin, this remained the same; If you're chip and pin is frauded then the bank is still liable. FYI, if your swipe is frauded, it is now the place the fraud happened (e.g. the shop) that is liable, something that was introduced to basically force most companies to change over.
I can verify that the bank take liability, as
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience the fraud protection has been really good. If your PIN or card details are stolen, any money lost is reimbursed by the bank. Moreover, when they detect that a retailer is stealing card numbers somehow (which they detect using a program to analyze log files and look for inconsistencies, etc.), they immediately cancel the cards of anyone who u
Weird (Score:2)
I type my PIN almost every time I use my card, and I use my card a lot. Cheques are an almost exctinct species here. It's money or card, mostly. The
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For internet and telephone banking there is a 6-10 digit number (at least with HSBC) chosen by the account holder for verification.
Once you have someone's DOB, bank security number you can basically do anything with the account (eg wire the money anywhere else in the world). They usually ask for three digits
Missing the point... (Score:3, Funny)
That's nothing. Tetris in Delft in 1995. (Score:2)
I was there and it was absolutely hilarious
Great stuff for those interested in Tetris
No Cards Here (Score:2)
PIN Number? (Score:2, Funny)
Are British banks that clueless? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, you can get the PIN that method, but unless you can actaully handshake with the EMV chip you have absolutly zero chance of getting the bank details. In the UK certainly the chip readers do now actually have the option to confiscate the card so a fake mini-EPOS terminal is not going to work.
Your idea about using a real EMV EPOS terminal is a non starter as most of them are not allowed to do offline transactions - so you'd need an account and access codes to be able to us
They replaced all the innards! (Score:2, Redundant)
Umm , how exactly does that prove the actual terminal is vulnerable? Other than if you get hold of one and have some tools at hand and lots of time then yes you can open the lid and get to the electronics inside. But I think we all knew that already.
This is a non-event.
PIN Number? (Score:2)
Why not PINN number, or PINNN Number?
I'm sure they enter their "PIN Number" into the "ATM Machine".
Debit Cards (Score:5, Informative)
So - the only time I have to enter my pin number is at the ATM. For all other purchases I use it like a credit card (and save the ATM surcharge as well).
Forget about the PIN (Score:2, Informative)
In Portugal we had an attempt on a similar technology back in the middle 90's, called PMB ("Porta Moedas Multibanco", which translates roughly into "ATM Wallet").
It was basically a smart-card you could load with a certain amount on any ATM and make payments anywhere a terminal existed (many vending machines, for instance, accepted PMB) without inserting any code whatsoever. So it basically replaced your wallet, if someone stole it the money still loaded in the card would be lost.
This wasn't much of a pr
Replacing Electronics (Score:2)
the device is "unsafe", then can never be a "safe" device.
Its like taking a Volvo, swapping the accelerator with the brake, and then declaring
that Volvo's are inherently unsafe.
I still haven't seen evidence of the tamperer's acquiring possesion of credit
card info -- which is really the issue at hand.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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snort..
giggle..
ha ha
a ha ha ha he he...
Thud
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I used to work at a private financial institution that was a member of the Interac network. The security on modern ATMs in Canada is very good. Interac certification requirements are equal to or better than VISA/Plus requirements, which require: