WOOT '13 - Cloning Credit Cards: A Combined Pre-play and Downgrade Attack on EMV Contactless

Cloning Credit Cards: A Combined Pre-play and Downgrade Attack on EMV Contactless

Michael Roland and Josef Langer, NFC Research Lab Hagenberg, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Recent roll-outs of contactless payment infrastructures—particularly in Austria and Germany&mdsash;have raised concerns about the security of contactless payment cards and Near Field Communication (NFC). There are well-known attack scenarios like relay attacks and skimming of credit card numbers. However, banks and credit card schemes often mitigate these attacks. They explain that attacks are impractical (e.g. in a relay attack an attacker needs to have RF access to a victim’s card while performing a payment transaction) or even impossible (e.g. skimmed data does not contain the dynamic authorization codes that are normally required to perform a payment transaction). This paper introduces an attack scenario on EMV contactless payment cards that permits an attacker to create functional clones of a card that contain the necessary credit card data as well as pre-played authorization codes. The card clones can then be used to perform a limited number of EMV Mag-Stripe transactions at any EMV contactless payment terminal.

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