During my MPhil within the Computer Lab (supervised by Markus Kuhn) I developed a card-sized device (named Smart Card Detective – in short SCD) that can monitor Chip and PIN transactions. The main goal of the SCD was to offer a trusted display for anyone using credit cards, to avoid scams such as tampered terminals which show an amount on their screen but debit the card another (see this paper by Saar Drimer and Steven Murdoch). However, the final result is a more general device, which can be used to analyse and modify any part of an EMV (protocol used by Chip and PIN cards) transaction.

Using the SCD we have successfully shown how the relay attack can be mitigated by showing the real amount on the trusted display. Even more, we have tested the No PIN vulnerability (see the paper by Murdoch et al.) with the SCD. A reportage on this has been shown on Canal+ (video now available here).

After the “Chip and PIN is broken” paper was published some contra arguments referred to the difficulty of setting up the attack. The SCD can also show that such assumptions are many times incorrect.

More details on the SCD are on my MPhil thesis available here. Also important, the software is open source and along with the hardware schematics can be found in the project’s page. The aim of this is to make the SCD a useful tool for EMV research, so that other problems can be found and fixed.

Thanks to Saar Drimer, Mike Bond, Steven Murdoch and Sergei Skorobogatov for the help in this project. Also thanks to Frank Stajano and Ross Anderson for suggestions on the project.