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MasterCard Joining Push For Fingerprint ID Standard
schwit1 writes with this selection from a story at USA Today: "MasterCard is joining the FIDO Alliance, signaling that the payment network is getting interested in using fingerprints and other biometric data to identify people for online payments. MasterCard will be the first major payment network to join FIDO. The Alliance is developing an open industry standard for biometric data such as fingerprints to be used for identification online. The goal is to replace clunky passwords and take friction out of logging on and purchasing using mobile devices. FIDO is trying to standardize lots of different ways of identifying people online, not just through biometric methods."
I'll just leave this here.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If Bastardcard think I'm giving them my fingerprints, or even a hash of my fingerprints, they are going to be sorely disappointed. Even if their own systems are secure credit card related data is the number one target for thieves and crackers. Plus, they are Mastercard are bastards, hence my childish name-calling.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
1. perfect the payment card identification solutions you currently have.
2. deprecate the solutions that are blatantly flawed. junk marketing flair such as RFID was a terrible idea.
3. take a more proactive approach in identity theft, dont just triage it with a new card. target and eliminate payment card processors with a consistent history of exploit or breech. refuse to reinstate service until an independent third party audit is conducted.
4. use when ready a new standard with a proven track record and a history of functional security. Stop inventing nonsense piecework systems that hackers swarm like flies on sugar.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Fingerprints should be treated as user names, not as a substitute for passwords.
The system of telling someone a secret to identify your self and thus authorize something is inherently stupid. I con't care if its a credit card number, security code, or finger print.
We have public key cryptography, there is no reason to tell every vender you make a purchase from enough information to allow them to make arbitrary purchases. They should provide you with a request, which you can sign/authorize with your private key. This signed transation request goes to the payment processor (mastercard in this case). Then they can, if you dispute the validity of it. provide the signed request as proof that someone with your private key (which they don't have, and you never give out) authorized it. Thus they are more resistant to false fraud claims, you are more resistant to identity theft/fraudulent purchases.
Its clearly a Win/Win, but requires you to have a "smart card" of some kind thats capable of displaying some minimal information, lets you select to authorize or not. The transfer of data to and from the card, and the powering of it would be easy to do over NFC, and it just needs enough of a display to show the amount. It should be possible to make such a device for ~5$ in large quantities, but you could also just use a smart phone.
You obviously would want a system where you could contact the payment processor and update your public key incase your card is stolen (generally, changing your key frequently isn't a bad idea, assuming you have some nice way to authenticate to change it, like using a key you don't carry around with you).
Also, its trivial to allow such a system to transfer money in either direction, and extend it to multiple payment processors and currencies (open the standards for the interface, so you can make a single card that works with mastercard, bitcoin, visa, etc).
Do to the reduced rates of fraud, liability and thus fees can be reduced, and even the potential for privacy is added (unique keys for each transaction + third party payment processors which work as proxies and protect the content of your purchase from the actual payment processor+credit card company, and protect your identity from the store). Even things like bitcoins and cham tokens could be used if you really wanted to go privacy crazy.
So, why arn't stores using such a lower risk, lower fee, more secure and more user friend system? Because the payment processors have a monopoly and like it this way. Don't buy into their stupid schemes like finger print id; they just want to keep their monopoly, and access to all that valuable data you provide, and all those fees the venders provide. Better security (and privacy) is trivial, and this is not how to get it. Privacy is impossible with the finger print system, and the security isn't good either.
You lose your fingerprint data every time you step out of your private quarters, unless you wear latex gloves every all day. Copying and faking your fingerprints costs about $10 Fingerprints are the most easily collected biometric information on you - using them for any sort of authentication is stupid.
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Mastercard surely employs security experts who should know better. I would think most of them would come up with the same counter-arguments we'll be reading on Slashdot in the next few hours.
So the question is, who came up with this idea and why authorize to release it to the media?
So, having worked in this industry:
1) There are many much more insecure areas (card cloning comes to mind) which already have solutions ( http://www.magtek.com/V2/products/secure-card-reader-authenticators/bullet.asp ), and nearly 0 adoption. Why is everyone suddenly jumping on the fingerprint bandwagon?
2) There is no point in more physical security: The card issuers guarantee the safety of cardholders funds and merchants tend to be very touchy about missing funds (the traditional 30 day lag of AMEX *seriously* affects their market penetration, and there's a massive effort to do statistical fraud analysis at a high level, so truthfully a very basic security at the register is effective, because card fraud stays at a relatively fixed level (it could be even better but that would lead to more false positives and worsen the customer experience)), the cost of the round of hardware upgrades for the whole network far exceeds the cost of fraud.
3) What makes *sense* is to let consumers swipe their own cards so they can have card-present transactions from their own home, in conjunction to card profiling tech like the link above (it builds a 'fingerprint' of the iron filings suspended in your magswipe to preventing cloning).
4) This sounds like an attempt to me to reduce the number of card present transactions (which are much less expensive for the merchant) and make more money by claiming a larger percentage of the transaction and to fuel a round of upgrades at the register, much like when checks switched from magnetic ink to frontal scans (check21), which also had little to do with fraud and was mostly a internal cost reduction as well as eliminating some friction for depositors, but required widespread merchant upgrades(with those upgrades not helping the merchant at all).
5) I'm not sure how PIN security factors in here, since debit pins use an injectable encryption scheme that is performed *on* the pinpad which is injected onto it in a *tightly* controlled process. It is a completely different protocol (at least in the US).
6) There have been a number of transaction network breakins, and I for one (knowing some of the players in this space), would *never* want any kind of data on their servers that could not be reissued.