Samsung Pay: Tokenized Numbers, Flaws and Issues

Presented at Black Hat USA 2016, Aug. 4, 2016, 9 a.m. (25 minutes)

Samsung announced many layers of security to its Pay app. Without storing or sharing any type of user's credit card information, Samsung Pay is trying to become one of the most secure approaches offering functionality and simplicity for its customers. This app is a complex mechanism which has some limitations relating security. Using random tokenize numbers and implementing Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology, which do not guarantee that every token generated with Samsung Pay would be applied to make a purchase with the same Samsung device. That means that an attacker could steal a token from a Samsung Pay device and use it without restrictions. Inconvenient but practical is that Samsung's users could utilize the app in airplane mode. This makes it impossible for Samsung Pay to have a full control process of the tokens pile. Even when the tokens have their own restrictions, the tokenization process gets weaker after the app generates the first token relating a specific card. How random is a Spay tokenized number? It is really necessary to understand how the tokens heretically share similarities in the generation process, and how this affect the end users' security. What are the odds to guess the next tokenized number knowing the previous one?


Presenters:

  • Salvador Mendoza - Modesto Junior College
    Salvador Mendoza is a computer science college student; his research interests include but are not limited to reverse engineering on android apps, radio SDR and drones.

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