Credit Card Debt Management

There has been a small amount of controversy over the new RFID-enabled credit cards that allow contactless payment processing. Old cards will soon be obsolete as card issuers began passing around cards like MasterCard’s Paypass, Visa’s payWave and American Express’ Express Pay. Just a quick swipe and you go.

But how secure are these devices? As with all new technology, there will undoubtedly be some glitches to work out. For instance, a Marquette University Law School study cited a security incident with the ExxonMobil Speedpass key fob:

“The Texas Instruments Digital Signature Transponder (DST) used in the ExxonMobil Speedpass key fob features a forty-bit, unpublished, proprietary key that a research team cracked and used to clone a device capable of completing fraudulent gasoline purchase transactions at ExxonMobil stores.”

Proponents of cards issued by major creditors say that security is much higher on the newer devices. They have a cryptogram that changes with each transaction and security measures to prevent other radio frequency ID readers from picking up on the code inside credit cards. For instance, the radio frequency embedded in the cards is very low frequency and cannot be read from further than 4 to 6 inches away.

The Marquette University report questions whether this security is enough. For instance, even though the credit card devices may be nearly impossible to clone, how easy might it be for one to swipe the credit card number? This wouldn’t be through the storage of that information on any one computer system, because there won’t be any such storage. Instead, the credit card numbers might be swiped through an RFID reader, one would suppose. One thing is for sure, the world will be a much more secure place for a certain amount of time until the identity thieves figure this one out!