Attacker then emulates the card and makes withdrawals or payments from victim’s account.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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    11 months ago

    For those confused about how this could work with chip cards, the malware has two components, one installed on the victims phone and one on the attacker’s. The attacker initiates the contactless authentication at an ATM or contactless payment and their phone communicates in real time with the victim’s, which is tricked by the malware into reacting to that event and producing the one time token which is then relayed to the attacker and used.

    They also previously social-engineered the card PIN from the victim, in case the contactless event requires it (definitely in case of ATM login).

    The fact you can trick the NFC system on the phone into reacting to “phantom” payment events and intercept the resulting token sounds like a pretty big problem. The former should be entirely hardware controlled, and the latter should not allow the token to go anywhere else except to the hardware.

    • Lojcs@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      The fact you can trick the NFC system on the phone into reacting to “phantom” payment events and intercept the resulting token sounds like a pretty big problem.

      That’s not what’s happening though? It’s relaying a physical card’s nfc not tricking mobile contactless payments

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        That’s what I mean, it shouldn’t be possible to relay anything. It should only trigger when there’s a reader physically in proximity to the phone.

        Please keep in mind this is happening on the victim’s phone which is not rooted, the malware is a regular non-system app.

        If it were happening on a rooted phone I could understand being able to subvert the NFC chain because at some point it has to pass from hardware to software and if you’re privileged enough you can cut in there. But the malware app is not privileged.