The Rise of Thin, Mini and Insert Skimmers
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
Even if Bitcoin never gains mass adoption, I really like the idea of being able to encode a consumable transaction that both authorizes the transfer and encodes the transfer amount. I can imagine a similar payment system (NFC payment with phones, perhaps?) that doesn't disclose arbitrary access to my account, but instead allows a transaction to be proposed, I accept the transaction on my trusted hardware (phone), and the transaction authorization with amount is then sent up the wire.
This seems like it should be trivially accomplishable via mutual asymmetric signing. Vendor generates a request for money and signs it, sends it to my phone. My phone validates the chain-of-trust, presents me with the transaction request, and I can authorize it. If I authorize it, then the request is counter-signed with my private key, and the signed authorization is sent off to the payment processor, who has pubkeys for the vendor and myself and can validate the request and process it.
Even if you could capture the transaction-in-transit, you wouldn't be able to compromise it, since you would need signing keys for both the vendor and the customer in order to forge the transaction, or to create new transactions with the signed account information.
Is there any reason this wouldn't work?
These are coming to the US in 2015. I suspect a lot of the issues we have today will be minimized as we move away from magstripes and waiters walking away with your credit card.
http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/octob...
- the chips used (32kb 90s-style smartcards AIUI) are simple to read and save, making chip and pin readers susceptible to the same social engineering attacks as magnetic stripe cards (btw, in the UK there have been skimmers for chip and pin for some time)
- most terminals on the market transmit the pin in the clear from one part of the unit to the other, so it is trivial to doctor a legitimate chip and pin unit
- it is difficult for the consumer to verify the trustworthiness of an unfamiliar chip and pin unit
- in the UK, people often still try to walk away with my card, just as when we had magnetic stripe
- transactions can be conducted offline in most configurations (true for example in the UK, but not in Germany)
IMO the main selling point of Chip and PIN to UK retail banks is that they allow banks to reassign liability to for fraud to the customer. When your signature is forged, existing law clearly says you are not liable. When you PIN is discovered and used to send transactions, existing law is unclear and currently this allows banks to convince the customer to accept the liability. IIRC, American consumer fraud law is pretty strict, which is why the US has been slower to adopt the machines than eg the UK.
In the UK, Chip and PIN seemed to cut fraud for a while, until attacks like skimming were applied. Now fraud is back on the rise :(
There is good coverage of this in chapter 10 of Security Engineering 2nd edition by Ross Anderson, a book I highly recommend!
Erm, while it is simple to read public data off a smart card, you can't get at the private keys etc, this is pretty secure.
I work in this area and while I am aware of a couple of weaknesses in the scheme (Static Data Authentication is a big one, but only affects some cards), I am not aware that even a PoC 'skimmer' exists.
AFAIK (and as I said, I work in this industry) the only key-recovery attack so far involved an electron microscope.
>> - most terminals on the market transmit the pin in the clear from one part of the unit to the other, so it is trivial to doctor a legitimate chip and pin unit
This depends on the card, not the terminal. All parts of the system in a terminal must be secure, we have stringent standards to stop tampering.
>> it is difficult for the consumer to verify the trustworthiness of an unfamiliar chip and pin unit
This is true. A fake unit could me made pretty trivially.
>> in the UK, people often still try to walk away with my card, just as when we had magnetic stripe
This is less of a concern.
>> IMO the main selling point of Chip and PIN to UK retail banks is that they allow banks to reassign liability to for fraud to the customer. When your signature is forged, existing law clearly says you are not liable. When you PIN is discovered and used to send transactions, existing law is unclear and currently this allows banks to convince the customer to accept the liability.
100% false.
The liability transfer was to the merchant, not the customer.
>> In the UK, Chip and PIN seemed to cut fraud for a while, until attacks like skimming were applied. Now fraud is back on the rise :(
Please provide sources for EMV skimming attacks, I'd love to read about them.
As long as I'm handing credentials to an untrusted computer that I have to trust to behave honestly, the problem isn't solved.
This occurs in EMV transactions. It's not exactly as you describe but there are a lot of similarities. Effectively, in your scenario, your credit card becomes your signing token.
--edit-- Just to give you a bit more detail, there is mutual auth (terminal to card, card to terminal, card to payment process and payment processor to card), and the card creates a cryptogram from various pieces of transaction data (date/time, amount, customer verification method used etc etc).
Much as in store transactions which aren't conducted with Chip & PIN transfer liability to the merchant, online transactions without 3D Secure will also transfer liability, giving merchants a potentially hefty incentive to verify the customer's identity.
Edit: Also, it isn't a 4th party, the bank runs the service themselves.
I agree that a system for verifying/authorising specific amounts for online transactions would be a good thing, and I agree that the "here's my card info, charge what you like" model is a bad one.
If you see opaque plastic around reader, don't use it!
We haven't gotten much beyond stupid stickers and hologram seals.
The customer can choose a validity period and per/day withdrawal limit, but I don't think it's possible to enable on a per country basis.
http://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/key-functions/banking-stability/s...
The magnetic stripe technically still works but no transactions are permitted with the magnetic stripe.
Not sure if it's allowed though.
As I understand the PIN is stored encrypted on the magnetic strip (salted with the account number) which allows it to be verified even when offline. I wonder how strong this encryption actually is, given some ATMs still run on 20 year old hardware it can't be that intensive.
This offline verification of PIN is mostly only relevant for ATMs owned by card issuer, as whatever device that does this verification has to know secret symmetric key for this algorithm.
In Australia the chip card market is pretty advanced, and those use either online PIN, or can be updated (usually by the bank's own ATM). When offline PIN is used with EMV then the card itself does the validation.
Soon after rollout, enough customers complained about wanting to set their own PINs that they added a 4 digit offset field to the magnetic stripe. The offset from the stripe was added to the user-entered PIN, and the least significant 4 digits were sent to the hardware verifier. That way the hardware verifier didn't need to be changed. The only way to change the PIN was by physically bringing the card to the bank. As I said, the details are probably a bit wrong, but it went something like that.
I read about one attack where the 16 entry nyble-to-digit mapping wasn't authenticated very well, so attackers could steal an ATM, then trick the hardware module into loading a mapping that mapped 0-7 to "0" and 8-F to "1", then bruit force the PINs for a bunch of cards. Then they'd change the mapping to 0-3 -> "0", 4-7 -> "1", 8-B -> "2", C-F -> "3". After two more rounds of this, they could use the production mapping of nybles to keypad digits. For each round, it takes an average of 8 guesses and a maximum of 16 guesses to guess the PIN with the PIN. (Information gained from one round is fed forward to the next round's guesses.) There are four rounds, so an average of 32 guesses and a maximum of 64 guesses to extract a PIN. Once the PINs were bruit-forced using the stolen ATM, they could be brought to a real ATM, even though the attack wasn't able to extract any information about the DES key used by the system.
A later system had a tamper-resistant module that used 3DES to encrypt modem traffic between the bank and the ATM. Changing 3DES keys involved two different employees being physically present at the the ATM. Each employee would load their key-change info and enter their PIN. A combination of a master 3DES key and the employee's PIN would be used only inside the tamper-resistant module to decrypt the key change information. The key change info from the two employees would be XOR'd together to get the new modem 3DES key and a keyed cryptographic message authentication code (MAC) over the new modem 3DES key. Only if the new MAC checked out would the new modem 3DES key replace the old modem 3DES key. This way, no one employee ever had enough information to learn the new 3DES modem key, even if they somehow stole the master 3DES key used to encrypt the key change information. As I said, I may have had the details a bit wrong, but it's none the less very well thought out.
These days, I would hope ATMs use something similar to Kerberos tunneled over TLS with pinned certificates so that just breaking the public key algorithm or just stealing the Kerberos shared secret isn't sufficient to read the traffic or spoof communications. The bandwidth required for an ATM is so low that doubling the encryption overhead vs. TLS isn't a big deal.
Anyway, I'll try and dig up the paper on the attack on the poor authentication of the nyble-to-decimal mapping in the tamper-resistant chip. It was quite an interesting read. I'm pretty sure the paper was the main subject of a Slashdot article in the early 2000s.
Also, in the IBM 3624 + Offset PIN block algorithm, the offset is subtracted (digit by digit without carry/borrow) from the customer-entered PIN, rather than added. [2]
My memory has faded a bit in the 12 years since I read the paper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimalization_table_attack
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number#IBM_3624_.2B_offset_methodMost cards I dealt with had option to change PIN either online or via call to bank support. So it can not be stored on card for offline verification.
I image searched "wells fargo atm" to find an example of the big green thing. I saw lots of older style machines, but the first link to the newer machine with a green thig was to an article about skimmers.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/money/consumer/skimmer-camer...
On a more serious note, when I saw the translucent skimmer in the article I immediately thought of the glowing rim around the credit card slot at my bank's (not Wells-Fargo) ATMs and realized I'd assume it was unadulterated if that skimmer also glowed.
In my personal experience, through a couple of phone calls. I can't imagine that credit card fraud could be any easier than the experience that I had with debit fraud.
edit: http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0213-lost-or-stolen-cre...
tl;dr:
1) Maximum liability is $50 if you report a loss or theft within 2 days of being aware of the loss or theft, $500 afterwards, until 60 days after you receive the statement with the disputed debits on it.
2) Whether or not your card was lost or stolen (or cloned), 60 days after you receive the statement with the disputed charges on it, your liability becomes unlimited.
summary: Report loss or theft within 2 days, check your statements for crap charges at least once every 2 months, and your maximum liability is $50.
Debit cards tend to have fewer protections, though they still have some. And because the money has already been taken out, you can be more detrimentally effected; the bank has to investigate and decide to give you your money back, basically, which takes time (and hopefully you have an uncompromised account if you need to pay bills or whathaveyou) whereas with credit cards the bank has to investigate and decide it's not actually fraudulent behavior and re-charge you (not sure how all that works though). Just plain inertia works in your favor when it comes to credit cards.
In addition to the required liability rules, VISA and MasterCard both add on their own bits which reduce the liability to $0 under most circumstances, for credit and debit cards.
One option that seemed to have promise was basically a coil around the card slot area that would detect signals from rogue electronics being placed anywhere on/around the cardslot.
I assume it’s some sort of defense mechanism against skimmers, but I have no idea whether that’s actually the case. (I mean, at first sight those weird protrusions seemed like skimmers to me because they definitely look like foreign objects. But they are not.)
They've been popping up over the UK as well, but the first few times I saw them they looked more like skimmers than security devices. As per the article, they don't really prevent skimming anyway.
“It [the skimmer] will immediately disrupt those wishing to operate via Russian ATMs: A majority of the BINs [Bank Identification Numbers] of Russian banks are hardwired into the chip; they are not processed.”
I wonder whats behind that move; are russian banks more dangerous to have as an enemy? Did they pay ransom money to the developer?
Infact, this is them http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/03/green-skimmers-skimming-g...
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Unfortunately, the United States is the last of the G-20 nations that has yet to transition to chip & PIN, which means most ATM cards issued in Europe have a magnetic stripe on them for backwards compatibility when customers travel to this country. Naturally, ATM hackers in Europe will ship the stolen card data over to thieves here in the U.S., who then can encode the stolen card data onto fresh (chipless) cards and pull cash out of the machines here and in Latin America.
"Unfortunately, the United States is the last of the G-20 nations that has yet to transition to chip & PIN, which means most ATM cards issued in Europe have a magnetic stripe on them for backwards compatibility when customers travel to this country."
The chip on my card broke recently, and I found out that it doesn't even work in ATMs any more. Does that mean ATMs are only looking at the chip? If I blank my magstripe with a magnet, will I have made my card skim-proof while retaining ATM capabilities?
You'll be screwed though if you end up in a situation where your chip doesn't work and need to pay with the stripe fallback (pretty much all cards allow this).
Annoyingly I only have the one card and I'm travelling to the US at the end of the month, otherwise I'd give this a go and report back!
That's how I discovered that my card's magstripe was faulty (and being stuck in the automated booth on a busy highway is not a comfortable way to discover that).
1. If your cash gets stolen, it's goodbye cash. If your credit card gets stolen / cloned in the vast majority of cases you're not going to be liable for any of the charges.
2. The more cash you carry, the higher the risk to you, whereas a credit card has a relatively flat risk profile.
I've had my card cancelled multiple times though due to fraud and now have credit monitoring.
My card is far more likely to be skimmed or be stolen/copied in a massive database like Target than for my cash to be stolen.
If credit cards are used for risk mitigation, they are failing for the vast majority of transactions. A $10K transaction? Sure. But for a $3 coffee? It's not worth the risk.
If you can figure out how to make this scalable to everyone, there will be no advantage to carrying plastic. I have my doubts that this is possible.
>My card is far more likely to be skimmed or be stolen/copied in a massive database like Target than for my cash to be stolen.
Mine was, at Target, my account was drained of about $2K, and it cost me about six phone calls over two days. The only lingering effect was an example of how trivial an experience with false charges on your debit is, which comes in handy during my rants about how many politicians, news outlets, and credit card marketers scream about card number theft in order to grab eyeballs and push agendas.
I'm not a big advocate of slutting your card around, but that's because I don't feel like broadcasting every single minor purchase I make throughout the day, and because it's slower and more annoying (to you and everyone around you) than having your cash ready before you get to the register. I'm embarrassed if by some lapse of routine I get to the checkout and have to use a card for a $10 purchase, and the first thing I do is apologize.
And I've never been in a car accident. That must mean there is no reason for me to wear a seat belt!
Be warned, single folks.
You won't just lose cash to faceless thieves in dark alleyways. It will disappear into birthday cards, pizza deliverator tips, bribes to children, and other countless, petty, unnecessary, and off-budget expenses. That is where the card advantage comes in. It has your name on it, and you will more easily notice if someone uses it without your consent.
It's hardly worth worrying about strangers stealing your money when everyone in your family has a thumb in your wallet 24 hours a day. The additional friction in the transaction process for cards is actually an advantage there. If they made a payments processing system that somehow involved the buyer carrying around a 10kg block of stone everywhere, I'd sign up for that in an instant. I don't care if it makes it more inconvenient for me to spend money, just so long as it is much worse for everyone else.
Also, I don't know where you live, but in most of the US (by state and population), we're allowed to carry concealed handguns after jumping through some moderate hoops, and in the places I've lived like this, Virginia and Missouri, muggings are also not-coincidentally much less frequent (that was particularly clear when I lived in Northern Virginia with D.C. and Maryland a subway trip away).
I routinely carry ~$450 and a .45, more if needed, and just don't worry about credit card compromise aside from uses on the net.
ATM compromise is another story, of course; the one I use with a bank account with "a lot" of money is in a Wal-Mart open 24x7 that's part of a bank branch open during normal business hours, there are so many easier targets I'd be really surprised if it got hacked. The other one I use never has more than $1,000 in the account. For that matter, I don't let the first one get much above $2,500 before transferring money out of it.
I've bought cars using plastic before. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to do this.
Frankly I'd rather deal with the odd bit of CC fraud than carry a gun, but then I'm British.