Cancelled: EMV: Why Payment Systems Fail

Abstract: Ten years ago, European countries started replaced mag-strip bank

cards with chip cards. They're finally coming to the USA too. What
can we expect? In this talk I'll describe the European experience.

"The attacks we expected mostly didn't happen, but others did.
Terminals that were supposed to be tamper-resistant weren't, and the
same happened with random number generators; in fact the whole
certification system turned out to be a sham. A major protocol flaw
still allows thieves to use stolen cards in merchant terminals without
knowing the PIN; another allows malware in terminals to debit a series
of transactions to the customer's card rather than just one. In fact,
EMV is not so much a payment protocol, as a toolkit with which banks
can build quite secure systems - or shockingly insecure ones. The
latter seem to dominate, because the incentives are skewed. America
may be no different; although fraud costs several billion dollars a
year, interchange fees earn the banks tens of billions, so
implementations may optimise for the latter rather than the former.