Host card emulation with tokenisation: Security risk assessments

Host Card Emulation (HCE) é uma arquitetura que possibilita a representação virtual (emulação) de cartões contactless, permitindo a realização de transações através dispositivos móveis com capacidade de realizar comunicações via Near-Field Communication (NFC), sem a necessidade de utilização de um microprocessador chip, Secure Element (SE), utilizado em pagamentos NFC anteriores ao HCE. No HCE, a emulação do cartão é efetuada essencialmente através de software, geralmente em aplicações do tipo wallet. No modelo de HCE com Tokenização (HCEt), que ´e o modelo HCE específico analisado nesta dissertação, a aplicação armazena tokens de pagamento, que são chaves criptográficas derivadas das chaves do cartão original, críticas, por permitirem a execução de transações, ainda que, com limitações na sua utilização. No entanto, com a migração de um ambiente resistente a violações (SE) para um ambiente não controlado (uma aplicação num dispositivo móvel), há vários riscos que devem ser avaliados adequadamente para que seja possível materializar uma implementação baseada no risco. O presente estudo descreve o modelo de HCE com Tokenização (HCEt) e identifica e avalia os seus riscos, analisando o modelo do ponto de vista de uma aplicação wallet num dispositivo móvel, que armazena tokens de pagamento para poder realizar transações contactless

Payment Terminal Emulator

Atualmente, os pagamentos em dinheiro estão a tornar-se menos populares. No entanto, poucas pessoas conhecem a complexidade que se encontra por detrás da inserção do cartão no terminal PoS (ponto de venda), introdução do PIN e recolha do recibo). Esse processo de pagamento é implementado pelas empresas FinTech, que fornecem aos bancos e comerciantes terminais PoS prontos para uso. A fase mais cara e demorada da integração da solução de pagamento é a certificação do software do terminal. Neste trabalho, consideramos o protocolo de comunicação entre um cartão inteligente e um terminal PoS baseado nas especificações internacional EMV (Europay Mastercard Visa), juntamente com suas vulnerabilidades conhecidas. Para melhorar o processo de certificação numa empresa FinTech em Portugal, um software independente foi sugerido para emulação do fluxo de pagamento de EMV completo. Neste trabalho, apresentamos os detalhes sobre a implementação da aplicação 3C Emulator.Nowadays, cash payments are becoming less popular and few understand, what a complicated process stands behind the habitual inserting the card into PoS (Point-of-Sale) terminal. This payment process are implemented by FinTech companies, that provide banks and merchants with ready-to-use PoS terminals. And the most expensive and time-consuming phase of payment solution integration is is the certification of terminal software. In this work we consider communication protocol between a smart card and a PoS terminal based on EMV (Europay Mastercard Visa) international standard, together with its known vulnerabilities. In order to improve the certification process in one Portuguese FinTech company, standalone software for emulation of full EMV transaction workflow is suggested. We present details about implementation of 3C Emulator application

Performance Analysis of SAP-NFC Protocol

The operations cost of authentication session is considered as strict indicator to evaluate the authentication protocols side by side with the security requirements achievements in the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The secure authentication protocol for the NFC mobile payment systems (SAP-NFC) one of the recent authentication protocols that have proposed to achieve high level of security features such as the fully mutual authentication, anonymity and untraceability. Moreover, the SAP-NFC protocol can prevent the current security attacks. This paper, analyzes the performance of the SAP-NFC protocol comparing with the other recent NFC mobile payment protocols in the NFC devices that are included in the system. The performance analysis has illustrated that the SAP-NFC protocol not only supports strong security features, but also offers low cost in term of amount of computations

Another Look at Relay and Distance-based Attacks in Contactless Payments

Relay attacks on contactless e-payments were demonstrated in 2015. Since, countermeasures have been proposed and Mastercard has recently adopted a variant of these in their specifications. These relay-counteractions are based on the payment-terminal checking that the card is close-by. To this end, several other EMV-adaptations have emerged, with the aim to impede dishonest cards cheating on their proximity-proofs. However, we argue that both the former and the latter measures are ineffective. We only sketch possible designs in the right directions, with the idea to pass on the message that these problems should be look at much more carefully. We shortly debate what should and should not be the case w.r.t. confirmation of EMV contactless payments. We also discuss alternative views onto making contactless payments secure against relay-attacks via proximity-checking

Does the online card payment system unwittingly facilitate fraud?

PhD ThesisThe research work in this PhD thesis presents an extensive investigation into the security settings of Card Not Present (CNP) financial transactions. These are the transactions which include payments performed with a card over the Internet on the websites, and over the phone. Our detailed analysis on hundreds of websites and on multiple CNP payment protocols justifies that the current security architecture of CNP payment system is not adequate enough to protect itself from fraud. Unintentionally, the payment system itself will allow an adversary to learn and exploit almost all of the security features put in place to protect the CNP payment system from fraud. With insecure modes of accepting payments, the online payment system paves the way for cybercriminals to abuse even the latest designed payment protocols like 3D Secure 2.0. We follow a structured analysis methodology which identifies vulnerabilities in the CNP payment protocols and demonstrates the impact of these vulnerabilities on the overall payment system. The analysis methodology comprises of UML diagrams and reference tables which describe the CNP payment protocol sequences, software tools which implements the protocol and practical demonstrations of the research results. Detailed referencing of the online payment specifications provides a documented link between the exploitable vulnerabilities observed in real implementations and the source of the vulnerability in the payment specifications. We use practical demonstrations to show that these vulnerabilities can be exploited in the real-world with ease. This presents a stronger impact message when presenting our research results to a nontechnical audience. This has helped to raise awareness of security issues relating to payment cards, with our work appearing in the media, radio and T

Analysing and Improving the Security of Contactless Payment Cards

Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) is the most used payment protocol around the world with 85.9% of the payment cards in the EU and the UK being EMV based cards in 2019. The EMV payment protocol has made contactless transactions faster and more convenient for cardholders as they only need to place the card next to the Point of Sale (POS) to make a payment. According to the latest report of the UK Finance, the total value of contactless card transactions in 2019 was higher than the cash ones for the first time ever. On the other hand, the introduction of the wireless interface in the EMV contactless transactions opens the door for several attacks to be launched on contactless cards such as skimming, eavesdropping, replay, and relay attacks. Since April 2020, the limit of contactless transactions has increased to £45 as a response to the Covid-19 crisis. This might create an extra motivation for launching more attackers on contactless cards. This thesis is primarily concerned with investigating and analysing the security of contactless card’s payments and uncovering the impact of key vulnerabilities in the EMV contactless card specifications. The two main vulnerable are the one-way authentication methods and the lack of cardholder verification in such transactions. The thesis also proposes the following four practical protocols to improve the security and the privacy of the EMV contactless cards. 1- A new tokenization protocol to replace the actual Primary Account Number (PAN) with a token to prevent the EMV contactless cards from revealing the actual PAN. 2- A mutual authentication protocol to address the vulnerabilities related to the EMV one-way card authentication methods in the EMV payment protocol. 3- A novel gyroscope sensor into EMV contactless cards to be used for activating the cards by perfuming a simple move by the cardholder. 4- A protocol to use cardholders’ NFC enabled smartphones to activate contactless cards. The two main aims of these four proposed protocols are to prevent such cards from being read by unauthorised NFC enabled readers/smartphones and to give cardholders more control of their contactless cards in order to prevent several attacks. Moreover, the thesis also describes a Java framework to mimic a genuine EMV contactless card and validate the four proposed solutions. The thesis argues that the first two proposed solutions require minimal changes to the existing EMV infrastructures and do not have any impact on the user’s experience while the last two proposed solutions require some changes the users’ experience when making contactless card transactions