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Comment by richbradshaw | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly what I came here to say - if this can do chip and PIN, then can't we assume chip and PIN is broken? Cloning a mag stripe is trivial, cloning chip and PIN should be as close to impossible as is feasible.

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For the record, Chip and PIN is kind of broken...

• "Chip and PIN is Broken" (Murdoch/Drimer/Anderson/Bond, 2010) [PDF] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland10chipbroken.p...

• "Chip and PIN is Broken" (Murdoch, 27C3, 2010) [Video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks_w352BS-Q

• "Chip & PIN is definitely broken" (Barisani/Bianco/Laurie/Franken, 2011) [Video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JABJlvrZWbY ...and slides [PDF]: http://dev.inversepath.com/download/emv/emv_2011.pdf

In the US, the big benefit of Chip and PIN will be that retailers don't have any credit card information to store.

Do they hold a unique token though? Here in the UK, I've definitely gotten "loyalty" offers printed with my receipt even though I've only ever used my debit card there and not a store card.

Depending on the system they can still get an account/card number. They shouldn't be storing it but...

They can certainly get cardholder names and that sort of thing though. Maybe they've figured out a way to generate a unique token based only on non-secure data.

Well in defence of Chip and PIN (and I can't believe I'm saying this), the exploits listed above take advantage of "No Signature" provided. This is where the card just gives the basic CC information -- same as what is on the front. The bank can see this and banks only allow small transactions to go through with no signature.

In the demo they buy coffee, etc. with it. You couldn't buy something more expensive with it because the bank would deny the charge.

NFC is similar. You can use it for small transactions, but not larger ones.

That certainly isn't true of the Cambridge one.

From their paper: "We have observed variations between countries. While cards from Belgium and Estonia work like British cards, we have tested cards from Switzerland and Germany whose CVM lists specify either chip and signature or online PIN, at least while used abroad. The attack described here is not applicable to them. However, because UK point-of-sale terminals do not support online PIN, a stolen card of such a type could easily be used in the UK, by forging the cardholder’s signature."

Their attack uses offline PIN mode. This is further expanded upon in section III.

The simplified attack is such: Basically the PIN signed block doesn't get sent to the bank. Verification is only between the terminal and the card, and the card (or rather MITM hardware) returns a "all is well, transaction approved" message when in fact no such thing happened. The terminal doesn't go online and talk to the bank and verify the signed PIN block.

This is essentially misconfiguration of the merchant terminal that ignores the result of the PIN verification.

This is similar to when you tap a card to buy something. If the merchant system doesn't go online to verify it -- which it often doesn't for small transactions (<$10) then you can game the system.

It is. It's easy to see there are ways that cards and terminals can be set up badly. It also looks like there are ways that both ends can be set up correctly to get around most of the problems.

And cloning is still almost impossible. The largest risk appears to be copying card details which allows the fraudster to use cards online or in countries that don't yet have Chip and PIN. Personally I would like to see separate account numbers and details on the Chip compared to the main card number - i.e. you could copy some of the chip details but this wouldn't actually let you get anywhere because the number would immediately be flagged if it was found anywhere else. You'd then have another card number (maybe the one actually printed on the card) that you could use online.

Or perhaps we could just scrap the whole card thing for non-physical use...

(And I'm saying this as a guy who makes some of his money at this game)

Smart cards (and NFC) are designed to make it nearly impossible to extract the private key/encryption keys.

Yep, that's his point.

famous last words....

EMV has been out in the wild since the late 90s. So far all the attacks I've read about (and some of them are very serious attacks!) are to do with the protocol between card, terminal and acquirer. None that I'm aware of has yet exposed a private key, with the possible exception of one that required an electron microscope.

They are famous last words, but in this case they seem justified.

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