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Cracking the credit card code
- imrans 15y agoWhy should anyone do this it is against the law.
- corin_ 15y agoWhat on earth are you talking about?
- unwantedLetters 15y agoThe article mentions and informally describes the Luhn algorithm which is fairly interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm
- leek 15y agoOriginal link/source: http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/credit-card-code-01202011 http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/credit-card-code-01202011
- asymptotic 15y ago...there's nothing to crack here, so I find the title misleading. I would find articles such as "Cracking the ISBN code" or "Cracking the CRC32 code" equally misleading. To me, cracking implies breaking through a barrier intended to be opaque. Hence, Ross Anderson's paper on an attack on the hardware security modules in ATM machines to brute force a PIN for a given account in less than the full PIN space is, truly, an example of cracking: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf
- spjwebster 15y agoBack in the day, when processing payments for online transactions cost the earth and pre-auth was but a twinkle in the eye of the bank API developers, knowledge of the Luhn algorithm allowed one to test services via their free trials without having to give up one's credit card number. These days it's only useful as a pre-pre-auth sanity check.