this would be too outrageous for a movie script

[rodneyorpheus]

Now this is truly science-fiction crime: imagine if you could intercept the manufacture of credit card readers destined for major retailers and insert an extra chip that would read out all the card info and send it back to you automatically. No need to hack computer systems or anything like that, just get the data right from the checkout counters

Comments

[vret]

It shouldn't do, just like no-one should be able to read your encrypted emails, even if they have full access to your PC.

I must admit I've never looked at it in detail, but I've always assumed that the Chip in a Chip and Pin card contains the private half of a key pair, which once written into the chip can never be read from outside. The Card Reader could then send a sequence to the card, which encrypts it using that key, which is what the card reader then sends to the bank (I would guess that sequence would include the PIN encrypted with a private key belonging to the card reader). The bank, having all the public keys, can then decrypt both, which identifies them both as being genuine. Cloning shouldn't be possible because no combination of inputs would ever let these chips output their private key. (I would have thought they would actually program in, say, 100 private keys to each one, and have the chip pick one at random each time). There should also be an id generated at random as part of each plaintext, including date and time, so you could never send the same encrypted text twice. The bank would then send back a sequence to the reader encrypted with its (the reader's) public key, saying yea or nay.

That way, the card number and the PIN wouldn't be enough to carry out a fraudulent transaction; you would also need the physical card.

I don't know how the system really works, but I would ahve thought that was the absolute minimum it should be doing. I'm also assuming that the security code used for "not present" transactions isn't encoded anywhere electronically in the card, just printed onto it. Clearly, if siphoning off enough information is possible in the way described, then C&P isn't anything like as sophisticated as I thought.