Re: OT: Chip & Pin: How safe are the Keypad terminals?

On Sat, 20 May 2006 16:55:06 GMT, Amanda Angelika wrote:

But surely the number of bits in the encryption is irrelevant because
there only 10,000 possible PIN numbers in existence i.e 0000 to 9999
which means no matter how much you juggle it about it's still a 4 digit
number,

That depends how you encrypt it, any half decent system wouldn't keep the
number as four individual characters but shorten or lengthen it, say a
simple conversion of the 4 characters to a binary representation of the
value of the number they form or adding a couple of check digits fisrt
then converting to binary then applying the encryption.

You want the high level of encryption on any data links to try and stop
people logging the data streams and number crunching them at their
leisure.

Now I'm not a security person in any shape or form. I just think about
what you could do to get the required information. Now if I can think of
it it's pretty damn certain that there will be people out there that also
have the same thoughts, they may also have the required knowledge and
criminal intent to actually translate the thoughts into reality. Be that
reality a little bit of hardware to sit in a Chip 'n Pin reader slot to
log the data or some clever bit of software to decrypt streams.

--
Cheers new5pam@xxxxxxxxxxx
Dave. pam is missing e-mail



.

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