Chip & PIN terminal playing Tetris 228
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."
to misquote Franklin... (Score:5, Funny)
The team's next hack... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:PIN Number? (Score:3, Funny)
Missing the point... (Score:3, Funny)
PIN Number? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Living in Britain... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I wrote Tesco's system you should all listen to (Score:1, Funny)
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.
This seive is watertight... except for the holes that is...