
"The reason we think that’s the case is that it’s very difficult to monetize this as a criminal." “We’ve got six years of history, a hundred million users of these cards, and we haven’t seen any documented cases of this kind of fraudulent transaction," he told me. Vanderhoof also pointed to the fact that there's been no known cases of criminal exploitation of the cards since they launched in 2006. It merely requires the user of NFCProxy to make a payment using a card's stolen data a single time, and to do it before it's used by the card's legitimate owner. “Efforts to try to discredit the use of chip technology in cards is only making the users of the existing technology more vulnerable.”īut it's worth noting that security feature is far from foolproof. “The truth is that consumers should be embracing this technology because it’s making them safer,” said Vanderhoof.
#Credit card terminal android code#
If a single code is used multiple times or multiple codes are used in the wrong order, all transactions on a card can be blocked. When I spoke with the group's executive director Randy Vanderhoof in January, he defended the cards' safety, pointing to a security feature that generates a unique code that changes with every transaction. I reached out to the Smart Card Alliance, the industry group responsible for the contactless card standard, but didn't immediately receive a response. "If credit card companies see how easy this is to use, maybe it will incentivize them to finally fix my credit card," he says. Instead, he's trying to make credit card holders aware of the danger of contactless cards, and to drive home the point that researchers have argued for years, that the payment card industry needs to shore up the security of contactless payment systems or ditch them in favor of old-fashioned magstripe cards. Lee says he isn't trying to enable credit card theft or other crime. And NFCProxy can also act as a more general tool for analysis of so-called "near-field communications," potentially allowing users to analyze and find vulnerabilities in other wireless technology like corporate ID badges and mass transit passes. Lee designed his tool to be able to send credit card data across networks to other phones, so that the skimming and spending of a user's account can be performed in different locations. (The feature was likely deleted later because it conflicted with the functionality of Google Wallet.) Lee also acknowledges that reading the credit cards with a phone often takes multiple tries, though an attacker wearing headphones could listen for the telltale beep that signals a card has been successfully read.

#Credit card terminal android install#
NFCProxy requires that a user root his or her Android phone and install a very specific version of the Cyanogen modified operating system from earlier this year, one from a brief period when one of Cyanogen's open source developers added the ability to emulate a credit card reader.


It's just making it really easy to use and abuse." The phone is a very innocuous device," he says. Lee's attack is far easier still: NFCProxy, whose code he published online, allows anyone to both read and use a victim's data with a cheap and inconspicuous phone, spending the stolen money at retail stores who would have little way of knowing that the phone isn't simply running Google Wallet or a similar service.
