Trying A Bit Too Hard To Convince People That Contactless Is Secure
Written by Evan SchumanMarch 14th, 2008
One of the non-intuitive truths about marketing is that marketers love to suggest the opposite of what they know to be true. This was illustrated this week when a contactless payment organization leapt to attack the Associated Press for pointing out that contactless technology exists in credit cards as well as building access cards.
You don't address security concerns by pretending they don't exist. You acknowledge that everything is relative and that weaknesses are there but there are advantages, too.
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3 Comments | Read Trying A Bit Too Hard To Convince People That Contactless Is Secure
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-Christine
March 14th, 2008 at 10:37 am
The difference is subtle but very important right now.
The U.S. Federal gov’t is going ahead with using RFID style contactless cards instead of smart card contactless cards for security IDs. This alarms everyone in the industry. The Smart Card Alliance has been doing yeoman duty trying to get this changed, including testify before Congress and committees. (Disclaimer: my company, like most of the companies in the payment card business, are members of the SCA.)
While the radio may be contactless in both, an RFID card is passive while a smart card is active, with a little computer and active cryptography. Granted, the current “mag stripe contactless” protocol used in the U.S. is not as strong as EMV Chip and PIN with dynamic codes, it is still stronger than RFID.
The PIV II cards used in U.S. government identity systems now is an example of the right way to do it. Unfortunately, so of the Homeland Security border initiatives are using RFID, instead. The SCA Web site has excellent factual material on this.
In summary, painting all contractless cards with the same security brush is a mistake.
– Sid
March 18th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
While smart cards are certainly far more secure than RFID tags, which are nothing more than radio frequency bar codes, all contactless devices offer the potential risk of undesirable and unforeseen side effects.
Researchers have shown that the mere existence of a contactless card (such as the new U.S. passport) can be recognized by hostile persons. An overly-dramatic video demonstrates this with a fake bomb detonated by a passport-carrying dummy passing by. The official U.S. government passport cover wisely incorporates a Faraday cage, but the demo was performed with the card held open by no more than an inch.
A demonstration video also showed how an attacker with a laptop in a briefcase was able to briefly sit down next to a man on a bench, read the Shell Speedpass token in his pocket, then returned the data to their office and broke the cryptography. They then took their laptop to a Shell station and used their computer driven RF device to purchase gas on the victim’s account.
Distance is no cure. Published maximum distances that accompany commercial tags and readers are useful for antenna placement to assure high reliability reading, but are not actual physical limits. RFID tags with published ranges of tens of centimeters were read by DEFCON attendees at a distance of over 69 feet.
Contact smart card readers may require much more frequent maintenance, but contact-based cards cannot be surreptitiously read without the cooperation of the cardholder unless a physical theft takes place.
Any device that can be invisibly read at even a small distance without the consent of the owner of the device can be misused. We may not know the forms of the attacks that will be mounted tomorrow, but we can be assured that they will be attacked.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Just exactly what is wrong using with “contact-style” smartcards instead of contactless cards? Why is the credit card industry hell-bent on RFID? Is it really so much more time consuming to push a card into a reader than to wave a card near one? The tradeoff in security is about like the difference between getting hit by a car while riding a bicycle (RFID card) vs being inside a truck (contact-style smartcard). Considering all the credit card data that’s being reported stolen almost every day, you would think the credit card industry would be running 180 degrees away from RFID (what part of RADIO in RFID do they not understand???) but for some strange reason they are force-feeding consumers with cards that can be sniffed by anyone within 30 feet instead of moving aggressively to require smartcards, which are virtually fraud-proof, even for eCommerce transactions. Why why why???