November last, on the Eurostar back from Paris, something struck me as I looked at the logs of ATM withdrawals disputed by Alex Gambin, a customer of HSBC in Malta. Comparing four grainy log pages on a tiny phone screen, I had to scroll away from the transaction data to see the page numbers, so I couldn’t take in the big picture in one go. I differentiated pages instead using the EMV Unpredictable Number field – a 32 bit field that’s supposed to be unique to each transaction. I soon got muddled up… it turned out that the unpredictable numbers… well… weren’t. Each shared 17 bits in common and the remaining 15 looked at first glance like a counter. The numbers are tabulated as follows:

F1246E04
F1241354
F1244328
F1247348

And with that the ball started rolling on an exciting direction of research that’s kept us busy the last nine months. You see, an EMV payment card authenticates itself with a MAC of transaction data, for which the freshly generated component is the unpredictable number (UN). If you can predict it, you can record everything you need from momentary access to a chip card to play it back and impersonate the card at a future date and location. You can as good as clone the chip. It’s called a “pre-play” attack. Just like most vulnerabilities we find these days some in industry already knew about it but covered it up; we have indications the crooks know about this too, and we believe it explains a good portion of the unsolved phantom withdrawal cases reported to us for which we had until recently no explanation.

Mike Bond, Omar Choudary, Steven J. Murdoch, Sergei Skorobogatov, and Ross Anderson wrote a paper on the research, and Steven is presenting our work as keynote speaker at Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded System (CHES) 2012, in Leuven, Belgium. We discovered that the significance of these numbers went far beyond this one case.

Continue reading Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack →