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December 20, 2004
Chip and pin - really secure?
A professor at Cambridge University has warned that the new chip and pin cards may not be so secure as banks would have us believe.
Professor Ross Anderson, an expert on security engineering, think it's only a matter of time before the underworld adapts and exploits different methods of capturing PIN numbers for their own use:
"The sort of thing that I expect to go wrong is that villains will set up in business with equipment that will capture customer pins," he said.
"Now we're all being trained to use our pins at the point of sale it's a simple matter to set up a market stall and capture card and pin data.
"They can make up forged cards and use them, for example, at cash machines."
The banking industry repeatedly looks to the big French experiment in chip and pni, which has apparently reduced credit card fraud by over 80%, since first introduced around two years ago.
However, now that chip and pin is becoming more important a concern, perhaps that will create the necessary adaptive pressure for underworld elements to push to exploit vulnerabilities in the system?
Or, perhaps, as I fear, more people will simply be violently mugged for their PIN numbers. After all, you can't tell someone your signature.
More on Professor Anderson's comments at the BBC: 'Chip and pin' security warning
Posted by at December 20, 2004 06:32 PM
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