Does the Online Card Payment Landscape Unwittingly Facilitate Fraud?

Mohammed Aamir Ali, Budi Arief, Martin Emms, Aad van Moorsel
2017 IEEE Security and Privacy  
AbstractÑThis 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 merchantsÕ 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
more » ... erate 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.
doi:10.1109/msp.2017.27 fatcat:wp4wmfnpsvh6jbhajxb62cdwwa