Paper Info
Title
The Cards Aren't Alright: Detecting Counterfeit Gift Cards Using Encoding Jitter
Abstract
Gift cards are an increasingly popular payment platform. Much like credit cards, gift cards rely on a magnetic stripe to encode account information. Unlike credit cards, however, the EMV standard is entirely infeasible for gift cards due to compatibility and cost. As such, much of the fraud that has plagued credit cards has started to move towards gift cards, resulting in billions of dollars of loss annually. In this paper, we present a system for detecting counterfeit magnetic stripe gift cards that does not require the original card to be measured at the time of manufacture. Our system relies on a phenomenon known as jitter, which is present on all ISO/IEC-standard magnetic stripe cards. Variances in bit length are induced by the card encoding hardware and are difficult and expensive to reduce. We verify this hypothesis with a high-resolution magneto-optical microscope, then build our detector using inexpensive, commodity card readers. We then partnered with Walmart to evaluate their gift cards and distinguished legitimate gift cards from our clones with up to 99.3% accuracy. Our results show that measurement and detection of jitter increases the difficulty for adversaries to produce undetectable counterfeits, thereby creating significant opportunity to reduce gift card fraud.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/SP.2018.00042
2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
Keywords
Field
DocType
payments,magnetic,stripe,gift,credit,card,magstripe,counterfeit,fraud,EMV,jitter,cloning
Card reader,Computer science,Computer security,Gift card,Jitter,Counterfeit,Payment,Encoding (memory)
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1081-6011
978-1-5386-4354-9
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nolen Scaife1979.67
Christian Peeters232.43
Camilo Velez332.19
Hanqing Zhao445.83
Patrick Traynor5117187.80
David P. Arnold611.04