It has now been two weeks since we published our paper “Chip and PIN is broken”. Here, we presented the no-PIN attack, which allows criminals to use a stolen Chip and PIN card, without having to know its PIN. The paper has triggered a considerable amount of discussion, on Light Blue Touchpaper, Finextra, and elsewhere. … Continue reading Reliability of Chip & PIN evidence in banking disputes
The National Audit Office has found as follows: “For too long, as a low value but high volume crime, online fraud has been overlooked by government, law enforcement and industry. It is now the most commonly experienced crime in England and Wales and demands an urgent response. While the Department is not solely responsible for … Continue reading National Audit Office confirms that police, banks, Home Office pass the buck on fraud
We recently reported that the Commissioner of the Met, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said that banks should not refund fraud victims as this would just make people careless with their passwords and antivirus. The banks’ desire to blame fraud victims if they can, to avoid refunding them, is rational enough, but for a police chief to … Continue reading GCHQ helps banks dump fraud losses on customers
Today we have published a new paper: “Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack”, presented at the 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper analyses the EMV protocol, the leading smart card payment system with 1.62 billion cards in circulation, and known as “Chip and PIN” in English-speaking countries. As … Continue reading The pre-play vulnerability in Chip and PIN
Today, the UK Cards Association (UKCA) published their summary of bank fraud for 2012. This provides an important insight into banking fraud, and the level of detail which the UK banks provide is very welcome. The UKCA figures go back to 2007, but I’ve collected the figures from previous releases going back to 2004. This … Continue reading UK bank fraud up by 11% in 2012, but how much do customers lose?
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 … Continue reading Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack
Every Christmas we give our friends in the banking industry a wee present. Sometimes it’s the responsible disclosure of a vulnerability, which we publish the following February: 2007’s was PED certification, 2008’s was CAP while in 2009 we told the banking industry of the No-PIN attack. This year too we have some goodies in the … Continue reading Bankers’ Christmas present
The bankers’ trade association has written to Cambridge University asking for the MPhil thesis of one of our research students, Omar Choudary, to be taken offline. They complain it contains too much detail of our No-PIN attack on Chip-and-PIN and thus “breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure”; they also complain about Omar’s post on the … Continue reading A Merry Christmas to all Bankers
I’ve written enough over the years about people who tried and failed to get money back from banks after seeing transactions on their accounts that they did not recognise. Now I’ve had to go through the process myself. I got a refund from the NatWest after a dodgy debit appeared on the credit card my … Continue reading How to get money back from a bank
There should be a 9-minute film on Newsnight tonight (10:30pm, BBC Two) showing some research by Steven Murdoch, Saar Drimer, Mike Bond and me. We demonstrate a middleperson attack on EMV which lets criminals use stolen chip and PIN cards without knowing the PIN. Our technical paper Chip and PIN is Broken explains how. It … Continue reading Chip and PIN is broken