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Comment by hopeless | Hacker News Reader

What's all this "sign with your finger" nonsense? With Chip & PIN cards (i.e., all our modern credit cards) you should just need the chip & PIN. Signatures are only a backup authentication.

Also, signing with anything other than a pen and paper is still a disastrous user experience (see every courier's PDA system ever built)

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PIN keypads have to be secure... totally secure. Passing through the iPhone isn't security.

For them to include a PIN entry system, they would need to do so on the chip reader device itself (non-iPhone).

The keypads for PIN entry systems always hash the PIN before it leaves the keypad... no other software gets the PIN.

If you cannot offer secure PIN entry, then you cannot offer PIN entry.

You can still take a signature, but now the burden of responsibility changes. Fraud is covered by the merchants if you use signatures.

A good example of this is the Apple Stores in Europe: like in the US, staff use iPods to take orders and checkout. The difference is when it comes to payment: instead of swiping the credit card and signing on the iPod screen, transaction details are wirelessly sent to one of many Chip & PIN readers around the store, and you then complete your purchase there.

Do they go to cashwrap, or do they have just 'standalone' chip+pin terminals in the store?

In an Apple store they're often portable.

They have stand-alone ones around the store, often in corners or out of sight near main display units.

This isn't how it works in the UK. Here, staff inputs the order details, etc. on the iphone which is in a special case with a chip & pin reader and a keypad on the back. You insert your card, turn the iphone over, and enter your pin on the physical keypad which ostensibly separately transmits the transaction to the processor. Seems like a really nice solution and is something these guys should be able to leverage.

Sounds cool...I guess that's a new VeriFone piece of tech. It has been a while since I went into an Apple Store, they certainly used to use separate terminals.

http://www.verifone.com/payware-mobile-enterprise/solutions/...

In fact, I believe Apple Store in Europe (at least in France) uses this: http://www.ingenico.com/en/0/ismp_gtygmj7t.html

Dutch cards all have a chip on them, which encrypts the transaction. In other words, the machiene doesnt have to be secure, since it never gets access to the private key inside the chip inside the card.

They can still screw around with that one single transaction, but they cant duplicate the card.

Its like an ssl tunnel straight from your card to your bank. The other party is just passing the encrypted one time permission slip to charge money.

It completely ended skimming here. As for unsecured devices like an iPad, the goverment mandates two way authentification. This is done by sending an authorisation code per text message, or an auxiliery device, not connected to anything, that uses the signing chip on the card, to provide the user with a one time authentification code.

Even signing with pen and paper is a baggage we're carrying with hardly any guarantee of identification, and has challenges like your signature being too simple or changing over time. This is utterly rubbish and should be made obsolete in the digital age, IMHO.

Where are the finger print scanners or iris scanners when we need them?

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