Dutch Transport Card Broken

[Perry E. Metzger]

Harald Koch <chk at pobox.com> writes:
> Crawford Nathan-HMGT87 wrote:
>> Why require contactless in the first place?
>>
>> Is swiping one's card, credit-card style too difficult for the average
>> user?
>
> As compared to slapping your wallet on the reader? yes.
>
> I swipe my Visa / debit / Tim Horton's cards regularly. With the
> plethora of bad reader technology out there, no matter how practiced I
> am it sometimes takes 2-3 tries to get a good read. Heck, sales clerks
> who swipe hundreds of times per day sometimes have trouble. And that's
> with a relatively easy to read magnetic stripe...

Here in New York City, we use a swipe based system called Metrocard.
New Yorkers are not known for passive, accepting behavior, and yet no
one seems to complain about the swipe system -- it seems to work more
than well enough, and I have to double swipe at most once every few
dozen times. The system has held up quite well to quite determined
attacks, and the cards themselves are insanely cheap to produce.

I therefore expect no one else will ever use the technology --
anything cheap, secure and well tested in the field can't possibly see
wide adoption.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com

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