An Overview of the EMV Protocol and Its Security Vulnerabilities

EMV (Europay Mastercard Visa) is the international standard implemented to secure purchase and deposit/withdrawal transactions. It represents a set of security rules and messages exchanged between the transaction actors in order to guarantee important security properties (such as authentication, authorization, integrity, etc.). However, several recent research studies have analyzed the EMV security standard and show that it is vulnerable to attacks. This paper presents an overview of the EMV protocol and its security vulnerabilities.