Enhanced EMV Security: Preventing Credit Card Fraud From a Distance

The EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) standard has been found susceptible to relay attacks, impacting the store and financial sectors. The current EMV protocol employs RTT (Round Trip Time) for device distance estimation. However, RTT is susceptible to being affected by the angle at which the credit card is held and cannot prevent attackers from responding to messages prematurely. To prevent distance-based fraud, we propose ambient authentication using artificial noise into the natural environment for device distance detection. We employ implicit certificates for mutual device authentication, preventing attacks before the transaction phase. Ensuring confidentiality, we encrypt all subsequent communication messages after the GET PROCESSING OPTIONS command. Our experimental results indicate that our method outperforms other approaches, providing more comprehensive security. Our protocol is capable of defending against man-in-the-middle, replay, pre-play, downgrade, relay, and other known attacks targeting credit cards. Furthermore, the execution time of the proposed method complies with the EMV protocol.