Researchers Discover ATM PIN Vulnerability
Source eWeek -
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,899812,00.asp
Two Cambridge University researchers have discovered a new attack on the hardware security nodules
employed by banks that makes it possible to retrieve customers' cash machine PINs in an average of 15 tries.
The attack takes advantage of a weakness in the cryptographic model used by many HSMs to encrypt, store and
retrieve PINs. The system, used by many ATMs, reads the customer's account number that is encoded on the
magnetic strip of the ATM card. The software then encrypts the account number using a secret DES key.
The ciphertext of the account number is then converted to hexadecimal and the first four digits of it are retained.
Those digits are then put through a decimalization table, which converts them to a format that's usable on the ATM keypad.
By manipulating the contents of this table, it's possible for an attacker to learn progressively more about
the PIN with each guess. Using various schemes described in the paper, a knowledgeable attacker could discover as many
as 7,000 PINs in a half hour, the authors say.
The paper, written by Mike Bond and Piotr Zielinski, goes on to say that typical security countermeasures such as
intrusion detection systems are all but useless against this attack. Many banks have systems in place that prevent
users from trying another PIN once they've failed three times in a row. These failures generate alerts within the bank.
But, as the authors point out, an internal attacker "can discover a PIN without raising the alarm by inserting the attack
transactions just before genuine transactions from the customer which will reset the count."
The researchers' paper has drawn quite a bit of attention and is now part of a controversial court case in the U.K.
concerning so-called phantom withdrawals from ATMs. The case concerns a South African couple that claims someone used
their Diners Club card to make 190 withdrawals at ATMs all over the U.K. while they were in South Africa.
The card's issuer says that's not possible, because their ATM network is secure, and is suing the couple to recover
the nearly $80,000 that was charged against the card. The couple has refused to pay, according to court documents filed in the case.
As part of the defense, Bond has been asked to testify about the ATM-related weaknesses he and Zielinski address in their paper.
However, the plaintiffs, Diners Club SA Ltd., have asked for a secrecy order around the testimony of Bond and other security experts,
saying that the publication of the ATM issues described in the paper would harm their business and open their networks up to attack.
Ross Anderson, a well-known and highly regarded security expert and Bond's research advisor at Cambridge, wrote a letter to the judge
handling the case, asking him to deny Diners Club's request. Anderson argues that Bond's and Zielinski's paper?as well as a related
one he and Bond wrote last fall?are based on information in the public domain and that the order would interfere with research, teaching
and, in the end, make worldwide banking networks less secure.
"In addition to being published material, derived from open sources, and of crucial importance to the defendants' case, the
vulnerabilities are likely to be crucially important in other cases brought in the U.K. and elsewhere over disputed
ATM transactions," Anderson wrote in his letter. "Bond plans to incorporate much of this material into his Ph.D. thesis.
It is spectacularly unfair for the applicant to ask you, in effect, to prohibit Bond from including in his thesis a scientific
discovery that he has already published."
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