Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The unbearable lightness of hyping and PIN-cracking

Of course it is big fun to mess about with PIN-code systems and devising a way to attack them. That's what the security game is all about. But it is another thing to devise an insider attack and imply/suggest that such an attack is so easy to pull off that all banks worldwide should retroactively compensate so-called phantom-withdrawals (which as the camera tells us is often a family-member withdrawal).

So three cheers and one hurray for the authors of The unbearable lightness of PIN cracking but also a pat on the hand for hyping their research a bit too much.