Re:Factors in authentication
by apenwarr on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @01:07PM
(#18913349)
Chips are better than magstripes. PINs versus signatures is orthogonal. From the original article:
"Even ancient magstripe credit cards share most of these advantages. Their main weakness is that a physical attacker can clone rather than steal your card, which is much harder to detect. That's the only real advantage of chip cards: they can't be trivially copied."
When you think about it, having to physically possess a card (and being able to disable a card when you realize you've lost it) provides 99% of the security benefit.
"Even ancient magstripe credit cards share most of these advantages. Their main weakness is that a physical attacker can clone rather than steal your card, which is much harder to detect. That's the only real advantage of chip cards: they can't be trivially copied."
When you think about it, having to physically possess a card (and being able to disable a card when you realize you've lost it) provides 99% of the security benefit.