How Smartcard Payment Systems Fail

Speaker/Bio

Carrie Cramer is an undergraduate studying Computer Engineering at Boston University.

Abstract

IThis presentation will summarize the talk: How Smartcard Payment Systems Fail, given at Blackhat USA 2014 by Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. Europay-Mastercard-Visa (EMV) is the world's leading card payment system, and it is currently being deployed in the United States. EMV "smartcards" contain a chip that allows an authentication protocol to be executed during transactions. The point of EMV is to reduce fraud by making credit cards harder to clone and requiring users to authenticate with a PIN rather than a signature. This talk discusses some of EMV's vulnerabilities as well as several types of attacks on EMV systems that have occurred in Europe.