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Comment by chowells | Hacker News Reader

That's not true in the US, anymore. You can just hit enter when prompted for a PIN, and everything proceeds as if you provided the correct PIN. Try it out next time you go shopping!

I wish I could find the news story that alerted me to the fact that every major processor was making this change in the US, but I can't seem to now. Still, it's easy enough to test for yourself.

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Yeah, I realized that recently as well. Apparently when they first rolled out the chip readers, people complained that the authentication took too long (5-15 seconds), so now all you have to do is stick the card in the chip reader, no PIN required (in most stores at least). Brilliant! Consumer behavior effectively turned the chip back into the old mag-stripe system.

Chips are better than magstripes. PINs versus signatures is orthogonal. From the original article:

"Even ancient magstripe credit cards share most of these advantages. Their main weakness is that a physical attacker can clone rather than steal your card, which is much harder to detect. That's the only real advantage of chip cards: they can't be trivially copied."

When you think about it, having to physically possess a card (and being able to disable a card when you realize you've lost it) provides 99% of the security benefit.

I was always under the impression that the microprocessor on the chip should not allow a payment to be processed without the correct PIN. Apparently, based on the behaviour you described, my assumption is very wrong and the authorization is not made offline on the card itself.

The standard allows for both options (and that switchability has led to security holes in the past[1]). Nowadays I think most of them validate the PIN on the server side rather than on the chip, which is better in some ways.

[1] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110222

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