Mastercard launches card that replaces PIN with fingerprint sensor Mastercard has unveiled its new biometric card which adds a fingerprint sensor to the chip as a replacement security measure to the four-digit PIN. When the biometric card is placed into a retailer's EMV terminal, the owner will be able to place their finger on the embedded sensor. Their fingerprint will then be verified …
All of them do the checks locally, then simply tell the bank "OK all good here."
To get real checks would require all the data concerning the transaction being sent to the bank where a proper examination could be done.
It's not going to happen though. It would require decent bandwidth comms, and would make the bank responsible for errors.
There are different values of "secure".
In the case of smartcards in general it means "takes too much time and/or money to attack them". With debit/credit cards you can even make a nice budget for how much it has to cost the attacker to compromise a single card.
You should rather think about it in terms of physical security (where literally anything is possible to compromise given enough of those two things), not computer or cryptographic security (where 'secure' tends to mean that it's either actually literally impossible to compromise given certain assumptions, or that it would take more time than the universe has left).
I'm allergic to some stuff and when it kicks in my android, my laptop and previous laptops can't recognise my fingerprint. I always have to revert to "old fashioned" methods. let's hope that no one forgets about me.
Oh and today I seem to get more and more people who just swipe my card and don't give a damn about identification - pin, signature or otherwise. Clearly, it's too expensive for them to worry about my small transactions so they are only interested in the large ones. the large ones are mainly going to be on-line going forwards so it has to link up to my home somehow - in which case what's the point ?
recently acquired a cell handset with a fingerprint sensor,
As he willingly demonstrates, not one of his fingers performs the 'Open Sesame' trick. He has never been observed unlocking his electronic pride and joy.
Turns out he uses his OTHER 'pride and joy', in the privacy of a toilet cubicle, to unlock his cell handset!
I wonder if this would work on a bankcard?
When the sensors are set as to effectively reject a third person, cases of false rejection of legitimate users happen frequently. What would you do when you are falsely rejected?
If you are requested to resort to PIN, we are not talking about security but just convenience. Convenience for you as well as criminals as shown in this 30second video.
https://youtu.be/7UAgtPtmUbk
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
