The Internet of Bad Things, Observed

In his VB2015 keynote address, Ross Anderson described attacks against EMV cards.

The VB2015 opening keynote by Ross Anderson could hardly have been more timely. In his talk "The Internet of Bad Things, Observed", the Cambridge professor looked at various attacks against the EMV standard for payment cards — attacks that have been used to steal real money from real people.

Such cards, often called chip-and-PIN or chip-and-signature, are generally seen as better protected against compromised point-of-sale terminals, which have been the cause of a number of prominent data breaches in North America. On 1 October 2015, the day after Ross's talk, a liability shift took place in the US and Canada, making merchants whose terminals do not support EMV liable for fraudulent transactions.

However, Ross did make it clear that EMV is no silver bullet and that many attack vectors remain, some of which are caused by poor implementations, such as the choice of a counter for a 'random' number.

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