Unconditionally secure credit/debit card chip scheme and physical unclonable function
This addresses security and privacy issues for credit/debit card users and applications, offering a novel approach rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of secure authentication and payment for credit/debit card chips by proposing a statistical-physics-based key exchange system, achieving unconditional security against mathematical and statistical attacks.
The statistical-physics-based Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) key exchange offers a new and simple unclonable system for credit/debit card chip authentication and payment. The key exchange, the authentication and the communication are unconditionally secure so that neither mathematics- nor statistics-based attacks are able to crack the scheme. The ohmic connection and the short wiring lengths between the chips in the card and the terminal constitute an ideal setting for the KLJN protocol, and even its simplest versions offer unprecedented security and privacy for credit/debit card chips and applications of physical unclonable functions.