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Chase Deploying "Touchless" Credit Cards
Rick Zeman writes "As reported by Money Magazine, J.P. Morgan Chase, the US' 2nd largest bank, is rolling out 'contactless' credit cards, presumably using RFID technology. 'The new payment method doesn't require a customer signature, making it more convenient and time-saving for consumers' which leads me to wonder if the next crime wave of the future will be criminals walking through crowds with readers to grab customer info. Chase says, however, that 'new cards are embedded with encryption software to prevent duplication and data theft' but since RFID has been cracked before, and the criminals are usually more clever than the vendors...."
store it in a shielded sleeve until you use it?
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
The article doesn't give too many details, but my guess is that this is nothing more than a SmartCard, similar to the American Express "Blue" card. SmartCards have had contactless technology for nearly a decade that utilize induction technology to communicate back and forth. The reader on the terminal is then able to talk to the microprocessor on the card, usually sending information that is then verified using encryption technology. (Think: public key encryption.) As a result, it's not possible to just run around and collect the info from cards, because they'll never give out secure information. They only give back cryptographically secure results. (At least, that's how it's supposed to work.)
Note that existing contactless technology is sufficient for this credit card, with a maximum range of up to 10cm. Such technology is supposedly already in use in Europe. (Europeans care to share your experiences?)
That's my guess anyway. I'm sure someone else can add a few details or make corrections.
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Your fingers or eyes (what whatever part of your body they are going to use for authorization eventually) are in danger!!
The new payment method doesn't require a customer signature, making it more convenient and time-saving for consumers
In Europe we have the chip & pin way of using credit and debit cards at Point of Sale. No signature required, but there's not really a time saving involved. When it comes to RFID credit cards though... well, the US can keep them IMO - there's no way i'd be willing to carry one of these, no matter how confident or assuring the bank tried to be.
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You need to be at a relatively close range to RFID to get a "solid" reading. Sadly a lot of people are under the assumption that you can basically just pull out a huge giganto RFID reading cannon and know what an entire house worths of data is. It isn't true, and RFID is frankly not really that robust of a technology yet. It would not surprise me in the least if a lot of these cards end up failing due to extremities that cause deformities in the RFID, rendering it completely useless. Me personally? I'm sticking to my card that I have to slide, not that it is necessarily any safer.
How about option 3?
:-)
3. Being able to wave your credit card while simultaneously keeping your CC data more secure than ever.
Don't mind the story submitter, (s)he's just making wild claims. This is probably contactless smartcard technology, which is far more secure than RFID. How secure you ask? Well, the card is only supposed to return crytographically secure results. i.e. You submit information to the card, it returns signed results. No data that could be usefully stolen is transferred. At least, that's the theory, but at least it's had a few decades to mature.
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I've worked on wireless smart cards, that act similarly to rfid cards, but have very good encryption, even public/private key encryption. smart cards have their own computers on them, so you can have a challenge/response, or just about any kind of encryption you can think of.
those are just as hard to crack as PGP emails. Not at all easy.
I don't care how encrypted or advanced or "secure" it is, I don't want my credit card doing anything unless I've taken it out of my wallet.
And I would sooner change my bank to get a normal credit card than I would buy a wallet with a faraday cage built in.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I design armchairs for a living you insensitive clod!
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
HK has been using a contactless cash card since 1997 called Octopus It's proprietary RFID system (built before the standard appeared), that seems to work quite well for public transport and retail.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I just don't see why everyone is so afraid of RFID credit cards. Simply have the private key portion of a key pair stored in the card itself, with the public key in an easily-accessible database. When you make a purchase, the merchant sends a random challenge to the card, which then encrypts it with the private key and sends it back. The merchant verifies against the public key, and, if it matches, the transaction is approved. With a smart card, the only way to use my card is to have the physical card, in which case we're back to be exactly as secure as the current system.
/. geeks would be all over this. I mean, it's not perfect, but it would be a hell of a lot more secure than the current system. Right now, if I take my credit card to a restaurant, the waiter need only make a spare imprint of the card (and write down the verification number on the back). Later, he can pull out a phone book to get my address, and then he has all of the information he needs to use my card fraudulently.
I would think that
I say "bring on the RFID credit cards". Simpler to use, and more secure than what's currently in my wallet.
Having to waste 10 minutes walking to the store...
vs.
Getting sideswiped by a semi on the way to the door and getting killed.
Your comparison is a bad one. You need to add up all those 5 seconds you save and compare them to the time you'd spend fixing it if your information got stolen times the odds your information gets stolen.
Let's also keep in mind how easy it is to steal your credit card information as it is. The number is written RIGHT ON your card. Every cashier you ever give your credit card to has access to that number.
And when that cashier runs the card, what happens? It dials up to the central server and sends your personal information over the phone line. If you're confident with encrytpion to someplace perhaps thousands of miles away, why are you not comfortable with encryption to something 10 inches away?
The fact of the matter is, getting bent out of shape about contactless transmission is silly. Either the encryption method used is good, or it ain't. You don't need to worry about physical layer compramisesif your transaction layer protection is good.
Also, there are other savings here than just your time: Contactless transactions are chepaer to process than signed paper credit card transactions. Merchants can save a lot of money not having to pay cashiers to sit there and watch you sign the receipt, and credit card companies can save money not having to archive those pieces of paper.
Economic efficiency is good for everyone.
paintball
In Japan we have been using contactless technology for our daily needs for a while now. Good examples of the technology are Felica Suica and Edy.
/. crowd has been all skeptical about this technology, over here I've not heard of anything happening that could make headlines for this and I personally have been using them for my daily commute needs and have never had any sort of problems with them.
As much as the
Now its understandable that people are getting all finicky about something like this, but I say first try it out before you make a comments on about it. Its a lot better then walking around with a wad of cash and it sure as hell beats having to stand in line trying to by a ticket for anything from airlines to trains.
Havin' it large, livin' the life, Welcome to the land of the rising sun.
I personally have 3 credit cards and 1 banking card. I'm curious what will happen if/when multiple companies pick up on this technology? If I wave my wallet near some type of scanner, which card will be selected?
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
If you can't see why contactless credit cards are a terrible idea, then congratulations, you don't have a criminal mind!
Does all that talk about encryption make you feel warm and fuzzy? Don't let it. Encryption gives ZERO protection in this case, doesn't even need to be cracked. The criminal doesn't need to understand the information he is stealing, he just needs to route it to a card reader that does.
The difference here is that a person who keeps control of their swipeable credit card has the assurance that only businesses they trust has access to the card.
The odds that a traceable employee (with a job!) steals the card while in the backroom is much smaller than an anonymous person in the crowd at the mall.
Smart cards are actually little processors. With current credit cards, all the mag stripe has is your info repeating over and over. You swipe it, the reader gets the number and contacts your bank (indirectly, they actually talk to an auth network who talks to Visa/MC and so on) to see if you have the necessary funds. If so, it places a hold on those funds and the transaction goes through.
The problem is that the information isn't encrypted in any way so all someone needs to do is copy it.
Not the case with a smart card. What happens with those is a challenge is sent out be the machine and the smart card computes a response. It's public key crypto. So the bank gives or withholds authorization off of the correctness of the response to the challenge. So finding the correct answer to a given challenge is worthless, since they are always different. You can't copy the data off the card, they don't allow that.
Poke around on Google a bit if you are interested in the technology but that's what makes people interested in it. You have to physically steal the card to be able to do anything with it. Also, it can even have data written to it. IF you use a GSM phone, you phone will have a smartchip in it. That chip contains your identity, so when a phone recieves it, the phone takes on your phone numebr and service. However that's not all, you can write phonebook entries to the smartchip as well, so those will come with you.
The only real security concern at this point is the technology is new. In cryptography, things aren't proven strong in a single test, they are proven not weak by years of failing to be broken. Since smart cards are new, one hesitates to call them truly secure.
RFID is a very good idea for many things, such as grocery tagging. For credit cards it's awful. There are only two possible states of an RFID credit card:
1) Safely in a sleeve, where no one can read it
2) Out in the open, where everyone in a certain radius can read it
In other words, you can't spend it without exposing it. Joe Hacker can hang out next to the checkout line at your grocery store for 5 minutes and get a dozen credit card numbers.
I don't care how much you encrypt it: it'll be cracked, and sooner rather than later. The fact that they are compounding this with no regulation of requiring signitures is one of the worst security decisions I've ever heard of - far worse than anything Microsoft has ever put out, and that INCLUDES ActiveX. Because ActiveX breaches don't immediately and directly cause credit card numbers to get stolen en masse unless combined with social engineering.
Umm, Slashdot has made this mistake before and it will make it again, so let me say this:
THIS IS NOT RFID.
RFID is a term used to describe a number of standards.
Chase is deploying "contactless smartcards" (ISO 14443). Contactless smartcards, like regular smartcards, use public-key encrpytion technology. Being able to activate / read the card does zero good, because the secret is stored in the card and never revealed.
ISO 14443 is also far more secure than magstripe cards, which have no encryption whatsoever.
I mean c'mon people - we're talking about a huge bank here - do you really think Chase is that stupid to deploy a technology so insecure that people's "wallets" can be secretly "scanned" from across the room?
As a matter of fact, yes.
Especially considering that American banks are WAY behind the rest of the world in areas like using one-time pads or multi-factor authentication. Heck, Bank of America actually only requires use of your 4-digit PIN number from your ATM account.
In my experience, you are actually more likely to get intelligent solutions to identity theft from smaller institutions. If something "funny" goes on with my account, THEY CALL ME personally FROM THE BRANCH, with a friendly voice I recognize. They also by default have passwords set up on accounts (and discourage the use of common passwords like maiden names).