Category: Banking security

What are the social costs of contactless fraud?

Contactless payments are in the news again: in the UK the spending limit has been increased from £20 to £30 per transaction, and in Australia the Victoria Police has argued that contactless payments are to blame for an extra 100 cases of credit card fraud per week. These frauds are where multiple transactions are put through, keeping each under the AUS $100 (about £45) limit. UK news coverage has instead focussed on the potential for cross-channel fraud: where card details are skimmed from contactless cards then used for fraudulent online purchases. In a demonstration, Which? skimmed volunteers cards at a distance then bought a £3,000 TV with the card numbers and expiry dates recorded.

The media have been presenting contactless payments are insecure; the response from the banking industry is to point out that customers are not liable for the fraudulent transactions. Both are in some ways correct, but in other ways are missing the point.

The law in the UK (Payment Services Regulations (PSR) 2009, Regulation 62) indeed does say that the customers are entitled to a refund for fraudulent transactions. However a bank will only do this if they are convinced the customer has not authorised the transaction, and was not negligent. In my experience, a customer who is unable to clearly, concisely and confidently explain why they are entitled to a refund runs a high risk of not getting one. This fact will disproportionately disadvantage the more vulnerable members of society.

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UCL Code Breaking Competition

6689260_sModern security systems frequently rely on complex cryptography to fulfil their goals and so it is important for security practitioners to have a good understanding of how cryptographic systems work and how they can fail. The Cryptanalysis (COMPGA18/COMPM068) module in UCL’s MSc Information Security provides students with the foundational knowledge to analyse cryptographic systems whether as part of system development in industry or as academic research.

To give students a more realistic (and enjoyable) experience there is no written exam for this module; instead the students are evaluated based on coursework and a code breaking competition.

UCL has a strong tradition of experimental research and we have been running many student competitions and hacking events in the past. In March 2013 a team directed by Dr Courtois won the UK University Cipher Challenge 2013 award, held as part of the UK Cyber Security Challenge.

This year the competition has been about finding cryptographically significant events in a real-life financial system. The competition (open both to UCL students and those of other London universities) requires the study of random number generators, elliptic curve cryptography, hash functions, exploration of large datasets, programming and experimentation, data visualisation, graphs and statistics.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the competition:

  • Joint 1st prize: Gemma Bartlett. Grade obtained 92/100.
  • Joint 1st prize: Vasileios Mavroudis.  Grade obtained 92/100.
  • 2nd prize: David Kohan Marzagão.  Grade obtained 82/100.

About the winners:

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  • Gemma Bartlett (left) is in her final year at UCL studying for an M.Eng. in Mathematical Computation with a focus on Information Security. Her particular interests include digital forensics. She will be starting a job in this field after graduation.
  • Vasilios Mavroudis (middle) received his B.Sc. in Applied Informatics from the University of Macedonia, Greece in 2012.  He is currently pursuing an M.Sc. in Information Security at UCL. In the past, he has worked as a security researcher in Deutsche Bank, University of California Santa Barbara and at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). His research interests include network and systems security, malware, and applied cryptography.
  • David Kohan Marzagão (right) is currently undertaking a PhD in Computer Science under the supervision of Peter McBurney at King’s College London.  In 2014, he received his BSc in Mathematics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research interests include cryptography, multi-agent systems, graph theory, and random walks.

Banks undermine chip and PIN security because they see profits rise faster than fraud

The Chip and PIN card payment system has been mandatory in the UK since 2006, but only now is it being slowly introduced in the US. In western Europe more than 96% of card transactions in the last quarter of 2014 used chipped credit or debit cards, compared to just 0.03% in the US.

Yet at the same time, in the UK and elsewhere a new generation of Chip and PIN cards have arrived that allow contactless payments – transactions that don’t require a PIN code. Why would card issuers offer a means to circumvent the security Chip and PIN offers?

Chip and Problems

Chip and PIN is supposed to reduce two main types of fraud. Counterfeit fraud, where a fake card is manufactured based on stolen card data, cost the UK £47.8m in 2014 according to figures just released by Financial Fraud Action. The cryptographic key embedded in chip cards tackles counterfeit fraud by allowing the card to prove its identity. Extracting this key should be very difficult, while copying the details embedded in a card’s magnetic stripe from one card to another is simple.

The second type of fraud is where a genuine card is used, but by the wrong person. Chip and PIN makes this more difficult by requiring users to enter a PIN code, one (hopefully) not known to the criminal who took the card. Financial Fraud Action separates this into those cards stolen before reaching their owner (at a cost of £10.1m in 2014) and after (£59.7m).

Unfortunately Chip and PIN doesn’t work as well as was hoped. My research has shown how it’s possible to trick cards into accepting the wrong PIN and produce cloned cards that terminals won’t detect as being fake. Nevertheless, the widespread introduction of Chip and PIN has succeeded in forcing criminals to change tactics – £331.5m of UK card fraud (69% of the total) in 2014 is now through telephone, internet and mail order purchases (known as “cardholder not present” fraud) that don’t involve the chip at all. That’s why there’s some surprise over the introduction of less secure contactless cards.

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