Yesterday I posted a report that a Boston TV station was reporting on the security risks surrounding Smart Card (RFID) technology. I had been reading elsewhere in the press that the technology wasn’t being deployed in the U.S. and asked for reader feedback to show me that RFID was, in fact, being deployed in the US. It is – sort of.
Visa calls their Smart Cards payWave, Mastercard calls them PayPass. They are out there in the U.S. and I was wrong. But I dug a little deeper! Here’s what’s interesting about it.
According to Visa’s website there are only seven banks that offer payWave:
Arvest Bank
Barclaycard US
BB&T
Chase
INOVA FCU
SunTrust
Wells Fargo
And you have to request them. I did a search on the merchants in Harrisburg, PA (that would be my home state’s capitol) and aside from BestBuy and a drug chain all the merchants are fast food, gas station, and convenience store chains.
It’s pretty much the same deal for PayPass.
Yes, they are out there. But here’s where we need to be careful with semantics. These are not Chip and PIN cards. These are RFID cards. They claim to be safer than regular cards. They are faster and no signature is required for most purchases under $25. They MAY require a PIN for debit transactions. As reported elsewhere in this blog, they have security flaws that regular cards don’t have and they still have the magnetic strip that can be swiped and cloned. In my mind, that’s more security flaws, not less. They are completely optional for merchants and issuing banks.
RFID is aavailable in the U.S. but as I’ve stated previously, Chip and PIN is not being deployed in the U.S. and there are no plans to do so.
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