More and more banks to mitigate banking frauds implement new methods of authenticating electronic transactions. Few methods rely on the customer's mobile phone. It looks that today the most popular are SMS messages and software challenge response tokens. Both methods can help in detecting the Man in the Browser attack. And in both cases the customer is able to verify details of transaction during making a payment.
A discussion about which method is "better" seems to be quite interesting. One of such discussion takes place on the OWASP-POLAND mailing list. What "the better" mean? It is tricky to justify which method is "better" because banks must consider several factors. Security is important but system has to be customer-friendly and inexpensive.
I am not going to write here about attack vectors and all pros & cons but in my opinion method which is based on SMS messages has more advantages.
The customer can receive SMS message with transaction details including full destination account number, an amount and an authentication code (valid only for particular transaction). The code is used by the customer to confirm the transaction. When the customer submits authentication code to online banking system then the bank will consider that the customer has just verified transaction details and accepted the payment.
The second method is not customer-friendly enough and can have security issues. I have to emphasize here that I do not have knowledge about all solutions which are available on the market and it is possible that some solutions work in different way and offer different level of security.
As I mentioned, the second method is based on software challenge response tokens. An application (software token) is installed on the customer's mobile phone. Bank and the customer shares the same secret key which is used to generate and verify challenge and response codes.
When the customer makes a payment, the bank's application generates the challenge by using destination account number, an algorithm and a secret key. Only few digits from destination account number are used to create the challenge. Of course all destination account number can be used but then the challenge will be too long. The customer submits the challenge to the mobile phone and after acceptance, details about transaction are displayed on the screen (but only selected digits from destination account number) - the challenge, the algorithm and the secret key are used to calculate and display such information. Sometimes bank requires from the customer to submit additional information like the amount of payment. And then this value is used to calculate the response. In next step, the customer submits the response code to internet banking application. When everything is fine, the bank will accept the transaction. It is a little bit complicated, isn’t it?
I'm going to write more about algorithms in next article. Here let's just focus on numbers.
So why such system can have more secure issues than SMS messages? All because of the challenge code length. Limitation of challenge code length does not allow to display all numbers of destination account. For example, in 6-digit challenge it is possible to “hide” only 4 digits from destination account number.
We can imagine an attack vector where an intruder will use different account numbers which contain the same 4 digits like original destination account number. It is important to mention about the length of IBAN notation of destination account number. The IBAN consists of the Country Code, a 2-digit checksum, a Bank code and the account number. The account number in Poland has 16 digits.
Now, let’s try to calculate the probability of above attack vector. I will use the formula for classical probability P(A) = n (A) / n (S).
Below calculations are performed for the attack where victim and mule accounts have the same Bank code. It is very popular scenario used by frauders. Calculation are done for 4, 5 and 6 digits. Also, I checked if showing first 2-digit checksum from destination account number decreases the risk of the attack.
In addition to the formula I created the Python script to compare results. The script generates the valid account numbers.
Variant 1A – last 4 digits are extracted from the challenge and displayed on mobile phone. Probability is 1:10000. It means that we have to have 10000 accounts to perform a successful attack. Few valid account numbers:
PL50101000000000000000008765
PL98101000000000000000018765
PL49101000000000000000028765
PL97101000000000000000038765
PL48101000000000000000048765
PL96101000000000000000058765
PL47101000000000000000068765
PL95101000000000000000078765
PL46101000000000000000088765
PL94101000000000000000098765
…
Variant 1B – first 2 and last 2 digits are extracted from the challenge and displayed on mobile phone. It is important to emphasize that the checksum is only used to verify if an account number is correct. It is not related to security and we can notice that probability of attack is the same 1:10000. The result received from my script is presented below:
PL50101000000000000000008765
PL50101000000000000000018465
PL50101000000000000000028165
PL50101000000000000000037865
PL50101000000000000000047565
PL50101000000000000000057265
PL50101000000000000000066965
PL50101000000000000000076665
PL50101000000000000000086365
PL50101000000000000000096065
...
Variant 2A – last 5 digits. Probability is 1: 100000. Few examples of valid account numbers:
PL94101000000000000000098765
PL89101000000000000000198765
PL84101000000000000000298765
PL79101000000000000000398765
PL74101000000000000000498765
PL69101000000000000000598765
PL64101000000000000000698765
PL59101000000000000000798765
PL54101000000000000000898765
PL49101000000000000000998765
...
Variant 2B – first 2 and last 3 digits. Probability is 1: 1:100000. The same is for Variant 2A.
PL50101000000000000000008765
PL50101000000000000000105765
PL50101000000000000000202765
PL50101000000000000000299765
PL50101000000000000000396765
PL50101000000000000000493765
PL50101000000000000000590765
PL50101000000000000000687765
PL50101000000000000000784765
...
Variant 3A – last 6 digits. Probability is 1:1000000.
PL89101000000000000000198765
PL39101000000000000001198765
PL86101000000000000002198765
PL36101000000000000003198765
PL83101000000000000004198765
...
Variant 3B – first 2 digits and last 4 digits. Probability is 1:1000000.
PL50101000000000000000008765
PL50101000000000000000978765
PL50101000000000000001948765
PL50101000000000000002918765
...
Above examples show that the risk of attack is very low but the situation can change when we consider that destination account is in different bank and/or that few last digits have value 0 (what sometimes can be true).
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