iPhone mag-stripe reader stalled article tells that Square, the expected to be breakthrough business launched by twitter-founder Jack Dorsey, won’t be shipping as scheduled. Interesting is that Square was just a magnetic-stripe reader, and that there were a dozen credit card-processing applications on the iPhone. Only this time, it comes with a plastic lump that reads the card number by taking advantage of a feature banks have been trying to phase out for a decade or two. That fact didn’t stop venture capitalists pouring $10m into the company. According to article much of the invested money has been spent refining the hardware, but the real complexity has been underwriting the security of a system.
I expect that this iPhone mag-stripe card reader hardware is pretty simple. It seem to plug to the external mic connector of the iPhone, so I quess the hardware could be just the read head and some software for decoding the signal from card stripe. The magnetic stripe read head is pretty similar to compact cassette tape player read/write head. The head from old tape deck work quite OK for this but is not as good as a reading head specifically designed for magnetic stripe reading. The signal level from from compact cassette tape deck read head is usually pretty close to microphone level.
Magnetic Stripe Reading web page shows how to read magnetic stripe using using a computer sound card and magnetic head from cassette deck. The article text as it appears in the Spring 2005 issue of 2600 Magazine. The output of the magnetic head is directly to the mic input of a sound card and a simple Linux software does the decoding.
Since all the data obtained from the reader itself is audio, the device can be even interfaced to a digital audio recording device. Later, you’d view and edit the captured audio file, saving the clean waveform to a standard .wav file to be analyzed with software. At least in theory this works and Magnetic Stripe Reading article says that it works in practice.
When playing with the magnetic stripes of credit cards is nowadays that easy, is no wonder that banks are trying to get rid of that old technology for a safer smartcard technology.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Shmoocon Demo Shows Easy, Wireless Credit Card Fraud
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/01/30/177220/shmoocon-demo-shows-easy-wireless-credit-card-fraud
“[Security researcher Kristin] Paget aimed to indisputably prove what hackers have long known and the payment card industry has repeatedly downplayed and denied: That RFID-enabled credit card data can be easily, cheaply, and undetectably stolen and used for fraudulent transactions.
With a Vivotech RFID credit card reader she bought on eBay for $50, Paget wirelessly read a volunteer’s credit card onstage and obtained the card’s number and expiration date, along with the one-time CVV number used by contactless cards to authenticate payments. A second later, she used a $300 card-magnetizing tool to encode that data onto a blank card.
Hacker’s Demo Shows How Easily Credit Cards Can Be Read Through Clothes And Wallets
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/01/30/hackers-demo-shows-how-easily-credit-cards-can-be-read-through-clothes-and-wallets/
As she showed on a Washington D.C. stage Saturday, she can read all the data she needs to make a fraudulent transaction off that card with just a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, and do it invisibly through your wallet, purse, or pocket.
RFID-enabled credit card data can be easily, cheaply, and undetectably stolen and used for fraudulent transactions
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Credit card (in)security issues « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog says:
[...] machine), which reads the magnetic strip as the user unknowingly passes their card through it. Technology needed to read the contents of the magnetic strip is pretty simple. Usually a miniature camera or fake keypad over original is used to read the user’s PIN at the [...]
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Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/21/farewell-magnetic-stripe/
For decades, the magnetic stripe has been ubiquitous on everything from credit cards to tickets to ID badges. But the BBC reports — unsurprisingly — that the mag stripe’s days are numbered. Between smartphones, QR codes, and RFID, there’s just less demand for the venerable technology.
IBM invented the stripe back in the early 1960s. The engineer responsible, [Forrest Parry], was also involved in developing the UPC code. While working on a secure ID for the CIA, his wife suggested using an iron to melt a strip of magnetic tape onto the card. The rest is history.
Is this the end for the magnetic stripe?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51yd4j4lnvo
As he slipped the key card into the reader on his hotel room door and tried the handle – to no avail – he realised what he had done.
For years, Steven Murdoch, a security researcher at University College London, had taken care not to put tickets or cards with magnetic stripes in his pocket next to his smartphone. This is because the magnets in smartphones are sometimes strong enough to wipe the data on magnetic stripes.
But so-called magstripe hotel key cards are rare these days, increasingly superseded by contactless cards with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips inside them.
As such, during his hotel visit in January this year, Prof Murdoch forgot to take precautions and, he concludes, wiped his room key – having used it only once.
“I should have known better, this is the sort of thing I do know about,” he says. Upon arriving back at reception, he realised he was not alone.
“There was a queue of people with exactly the same problem as me,” he recalls.
The magnetic stripe was invented by an IBM engineer in the 1960s – his wife was instrumental in the process as it was she who suggested melting a strip of magnetic tape onto a card using a clothes iron.
In the decades since, magstripes have been used on bank cards, rail tickets, IDs and even cards containing medical information, to set up hospital machines.
But that murky brown strip of plastic usually made with polluting heavy metals may not be around for much longer.
From this year onwards, for instance, Mastercard will not require banks to put a magnetic stripe on debit and credit cards.
For ticketing, new technologies including printable barcodes and reusable contactless cards are considered more environmentally friendly and potentially more convenient.
You also can’t wipe them by accidentally putting them too close to your iPhone.
Are there any benefits to keeping magstripe cards or tokens around?
“No,” says Sue Walnut, product director for intelligent transportation systems at Vix Technology, bluntly.
She argues there are now so many different ways of validating a rail ticket – for example, QR codes presented on phone screens, tickets printed at home, prepaid contactless cards – that there is less need to retain magstripe technology than ever before.
But magstripe tickets and entry cards do slot conveniently into credit card holders in wallets and purses. The new paper tickets being trialled by Northern and other rail firms are larger. “They are a bit unwieldy and cumbersome,” says Ms Walnut.
Magstripe has hung around for so long partly because it is relatively cheap and the specifications for reading machines were put in place many decades ago, says Stephen Cranfield at Barnes International, which makes equipment for magnetic stripe testing.
“If you took your card today and used it in a magstripe reader from 1970, it would still be able to read it,” he says.
His firm has worked on a variety of systems – including one designed to allow kidney failure patients to use a magstripe card for setting up their dialysis machine.
Despite the ubiquity of dark brown or black magstripes, they can actually come in a whole range of colours. “It’s quite popular in China, actually – gold stripes,” explains Mr Cranfield.
But now that US banks are finally switching to chip and PIN cards, the market for magstripe is clearly dwindling.
Prof Murdoch says although magstripe technology is extremely well established, it is “inevitable” that it will gradually disappear.
Sometimes, members of the public contact Prof Murdoch when they are having trouble proving to their bank that they have been the victim of fraud.
“If the transaction was done by magstripe, then it’s a very easy argument to say someone copied it,” says Prof Murdoch as he points out the irony. “But if the transaction was one of the more secure methods – then it’s much harder.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Make Your Own 1970s Magnetic Stripe Cards
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/25/make-your-own-1970s-magnetic-stripe-cards/
Hacker Reads Magnetic Stripe Card With Flatbed Scanner
https://hackaday.com/2015/08/07/hacker-reads-magnetic-stripe-card-with-flatbed-scanner/