Prof. David Basin, Dr. Ralf Sasse and Dr. Jorge Toro-Pozo received the Best Practical Paper Award at the 2021 edition of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for their work on novel attacks against the EMV standard. Their paper “The EMV Standard: Break, Fix, Verify” discusses vulnerabilities on payment protocols used widely by some credit card companies and common payment terminals. Such vulnerabilities allow attackers to perform high-value contactless payments with credit cards without using the card’s PIN. More details on this work are available on the project website https://emvrace.github.io/ where follow up results on other credit cards are also available.
The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific conferences in the field. This year 115 papers were selected for presentation out of 952 submissions.