Re:Cracking the credit card code
by asymptotic on Thursday May 05, 2011 @08:02AM
(#2516981)
...there's nothing to crack here, so I find the title misleading. I would find articles such as "Cracking the ISBN code" or "Cracking the CRC32 code" equally misleading.
To me, cracking implies breaking through a barrier intended to be opaque. Hence, Ross Anderson's paper on an attack on the hardware security modules in ATM machines to brute force a PIN for a given account in less than the full PIN space is, truly, an example of cracking:
Re:Cracking the credit card code
by spjwebster on Monday May 09, 2011 @01:59PM
(#2529559)
Back in the day, when processing payments for online transactions cost the earth and pre-auth was but a twinkle in the eye of the bank API developers, knowledge of the Luhn algorithm allowed one to test services via their free trials without having to give up one's credit card number. These days it's only useful as a pre-pre-auth sanity check.
To me, cracking implies breaking through a barrier intended to be opaque. Hence, Ross Anderson's paper on an attack on the hardware security modules in ATM machines to brute force a PIN for a given account in less than the full PIN space is, truly, an example of cracking:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm