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Lookup NU author(s): Mohammed Ali, Dr Leonardus Arief, Dr Martin Emms, Professor Aad van Moorsel
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2017.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
This article provides an extensive study of the current practice of online payment using credit and debit cards, and the intrinsic security challenges caused by the differences in how payment sites operate. We investigated the Alexa top-400 online merchants’ payment sites, and realised that the current landscape facilitates a distributed guessing attack. This attack subverts the payment functionality from its intended purpose of validating card details, into helping the attackers to generate all security data fields required to make online transactions. We will show that this attack would not be practical if all payment sites performed the same security checks. As part of our responsible disclosure measure, we notified a selection of payment sites about our findings, and we report on their responses. We will discuss potential solutions to the problem and the practical difficulty to implement these, given the varying technical and business concerns of the involved parties.
Author(s): Ali MA, Arief B, Emms M, van Moorsel A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: IEEE Security & Privacy
Year: 2017
Volume: 15
Issue: 2
Pages: 78-86
Online publication date: 03/04/2017
Acceptance date: 01/11/2016
Date deposited: 01/12/2016
ISSN (print): 1540-7993
ISSN (electronic): 1558-4046
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2017.27
DOI: 10.1109/MSP.2017.27
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