Chip and Pin Credit Card Vulnerabilities

This is old news to europeans, but Canada has just started to move to this technology, and it looks like the same systems that are deployed in Europe. With that in mind, here are a few links to known problems in the European model

Chip and Spin is a site that looks at the overall context of the Chip and PIN model, but most interesting of all is that of all places to be doing this type of research, the University of Cambridge is investigating Banking security.

The main issue is that with a credit card containing a chip and the customer providing the PIN, it is going to be a lot harder for the account holder to prove that the transaction is fraudulent. But as the study shows, cloning a card containing a chip is not that hard, and obtaining the pin is not much harder (even before we get into the social engineering possibilities).

Money quote from the Banking security study:

We demonstrate how fraudsters could collect card details and PINs, despite the victims taking all due care to protect their information. This means that customers should not automatically be considered liable for fraud, simply because the PIN was used. Even though a customer’s PIN might have been compromised, this is not conclusive evidence that he or she has been negligent.

Update from the same source - How Not to Design Authentication talks about the problems of using credit cards for online transactions (card not present transactions).

Yet another update from the same team: Chip and PIN is broken

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”.