EMV Electronic Payment System and its Attacks: A Review

Abstract

Recently,The Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and Point of Sale (POS) are based on the Europay, MasterCard and VisaCard (EMV) protocol. The goal of the EMV protocol is to enhance and improve the level of transaction security at both ATMs and Points of Sale. Despite the high performance of electronic payment systems, they suffer from attacks that can lead to unauthorized disclosure of cardholder data. This paper describes the EMV protocol and its features, and common attacks that threaten EMV card users in transactions at both ATMs and Points of Sale. The study will document the vulnerabilities that threaten EMV card holders and provide countermeasures against various potential attacks. It also describes the proposed methods that have been introduced in recent years to overcome these attacks and enhance the security level of the EMV protocol. The results of the comparison showed that biometrics has the highest performance in card security based on the EMV protocol with additional improvements in the encryption phase against all types of attacks.