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In Europe, they could do away with the magnetic strip on cash cards. All terminals from recent years support the smartcard interface to the chip on the card. Pr
by pmjordan 17y ago
In Europe, they could do away with the magnetic strip on cash cards. All terminals from recent years support the smartcard interface to the chip on the card. Presumably they keep the strip around for when you visit a country that doesn't use the smart card interface, so they can charge you an arm and a leg for exchanging currencies. And that recent case in Germany where the chips didn't support the year 2010, so you could only withdraw cash when you masked the interface with tape.
The smartcard mechanism hopefully uses some challenge-response setup that makes it impossible to read out by scammers. (aside from the difficulty of interfacing with the chip during the split second it's in the right position)
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoDoesn't the ATM offer a unique challenge each time? Would it matter if the skimmer knew what challenge had been made and what the answer was?
- pmjordan 17y agoI don't know exactly how it's implemented (tptacek and cperciva would probably have a field day with it) but I think the idea is to prevent exactly such replay attacks by generating the challenge on the bank's central servers.
- Tichy 17y agoHm, should I glue a strip of tinfoil on the magnetic strip? Or what would be a good way to disable it?
- pmjordan 17y agoA magnetic card writer should definitely do the trick...
- Tichy 17y agoTrue, but then I would lose the option to use it at the few places where they don't understand the chip yet. Might be the better choice, though. Thinking a bit further, perhaps it would be possible to create some fake information on the magnet stripe that would identify anybody who uses it as a thief?
- pmjordan 17y agoYeah, I'm not seriously recommending you reprogram your bank card... Maybe you could strap an alternative magnetic strip to the card, which you'd only take off if you really need the real strip.