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Yes, researchers demonstrated that certain Visa contactless transactions could proceed without the card’s PIN—but the finding was not a universal break of EMV cards or contactless payments. In research first reported in 2020, ETH Zurich researchers used a smartphone as an intermediary between a Visa card and a payment terminal to alter how the terminal understood cardholder verification. They completed high-value transactions on real terminals using their own cards. The work also described a separate, modeled attack involving offline transactions; that attack was not tested on live terminals. The available sources do not establish the current status of fixes or widespread criminal use.
What the ETH Zurich research found
The headline refers to The EMV Standard: Break, Fix, Verify, a study by David Basin, Ralf Sasse and Jorge Toro-Pozo of ETH Zurich. The researchers used the Tamarin symbolic protocol verifier to analyze EMV, the payment-card standard associated with Europay, Mastercard and Visa. The final arXiv version is dated February 17, 2021; contemporary coverage appeared in 2020, including SecurityWeek’s August 28, 2020 report.
The paper reported two distinct security issues:
- A demonstrated contactless cardholder-verification bypass: A proof-of-concept Android application relayed communication between a Visa contactless card and a payment terminal, changing protocol information so the terminal treated verification as having been completed on the consumer’s device. The transaction could then proceed without entry of the physical card’s PIN.
- A modeled offline-transaction attack: The researchers described how a terminal could accept an offline transaction with an unauthentic Application Cryptogram, leaving the issuer to identify the problem later during clearing. They did not try this attack on live terminals.
These are not the same attack: the first was demonstrated on real payment terminals and concerned cardholder verification; the second was a formal-analysis result about offline acceptance and potential merchant loss.
How can a payment go through without a PIN?
EMV transactions involve several separate checks. A card may be authenticated, the cardholder may be asked to verify their identity, and the transaction may then be authorized. These are related but different questions:
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- Card authentication: Does the card appear genuine?
- Cardholder verification: Has the person presenting it completed an accepted method, such as an online PIN, offline PIN, signature, no verification, or a Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method (CDCVM), such as phone-based fingerprint or face authentication?
- Authorization: Will the issuer or terminal approve the transaction?
A genuine card can participate in a transaction without the protocol securely proving that its rightful user entered a PIN. The researchers’ concern was that, in certain Visa contactless flows, information used to select the cardholder-verification method was not adequately authenticated against modification. A terminal could therefore be led to believe that an acceptable verification method had been performed on a consumer device.
The PIN itself was not cracked or recovered, and the card was not cloned. The attack used an intermediary to manipulate the verification decision communicated in the transaction. Strong card authentication does not automatically authenticate the separate claim that the cardholder completed a PIN or device check.
What was actually demonstrated?
The researchers tested Visa Credit, Visa Electron and V Pay cards on real payment terminals. They reported high-value transactions above the applicable cardholder-verification threshold, including an attended-store purchase of approximately $190 and a separate demonstration involving about 200 Swiss francs. They used their own cards and paid for the goods. The researchers said the Android application was not released publicly at the time because the issues had been reported and remained unresolved in the paper’s account.
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This establishes feasibility in the tested circumstances. It does not establish that criminals exploited the technique at scale, that every Visa card or terminal is vulnerable, or that every contactless payment can avoid verification. Contactless limits and terminal configurations vary by market, issuer, card product and payment setup; there is no universal threshold implied by the study.
Which cards and transactions are implicated?
The strongest conclusion is limited: the researchers identified serious weaknesses in certain Visa contactless configurations. Their analysis was about protocol configurations and terminal behavior, not a blanket weakness in all cards bearing a particular brand.
The paper also analyzed Mastercard configurations. It found the modern Mastercard configuration it examined—particularly Combined Data Authentication (CDA) with online PIN—secure for the relevant high-value scenarios modeled. That is not proof that every Mastercard product, legacy mode or transaction is secure. The researchers noted shortcomings in older authentication modes, which they characterized as difficult to exploit in practice. They also suggested the PIN-bypass technique might apply to Discover or UnionPay contactless kernels, but did not test those possibilities.
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The demonstrated bypass concerned contactless transactions. It should not be generalized to inserted chip-and-PIN payments, ATM PIN entry, online PIN verification generally, mobile wallets as a whole, or every transaction made with a Visa card. In particular, the researchers’ phone served as an intermediary; that is not the same as showing that ordinary mobile-wallet payments were compromised.
The separate offline attack and why merchants matter
In the second attack, the concern was not primarily a cardholder’s PIN. It was a merchant accepting an offline transaction that looked acceptable locally but carried an invalid or unauthentic Application Cryptogram. The terminal cannot verify that cryptogram in the same way the issuer can because the relevant symmetric key is shared by the card and issuer. If the terminal accepts the transaction offline, the issuer may detect the invalid cryptogram only later, during clearing—after the merchant has handed over the goods.
This was a modeled attack, not a live-terminal demonstration. The researchers said they did not test it on real terminals because that would have constituted fraud. A later decline does not by itself mean a terminal was compromised; it could reflect a transaction rejected during the issuer’s later checks.
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What could reduce the risk?
The paper’s proposed mitigations focused on payment-system participants and terminal behavior, not simply replacing cards already in circulation. For the Visa PIN-bypass scenario, the researchers recommended terminal-side use of Dynamic Data Authentication (DDA) for online transactions, setting the relevant Terminal Transaction Qualifiers capability, and verifying the card’s Signed Dynamic Authentication Data.
For the offline-transaction issue, they proposed requiring online authorization or including and authenticating additional transaction data in the cryptographic process. The paper said these changes could be implemented by Visa and banks without changing cards already in circulation.
These are research recommendations, not evidence that all terminals or payment systems subsequently adopted them. The available sources do not independently verify the current scope or completion of remediation by Visa, issuers, acquirers or terminal manufacturers. The researchers said they notified Visa on April 30, 2020; that disclosure date does not establish the present state of production systems.
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What cardholders can do
- Report a lost or stolen card to the issuer promptly.
- Enable transaction alerts and review account activity regularly.
- Contact the issuer immediately about an unfamiliar contactless transaction.
- Ask whether the issuer recommends a replacement card or a network token for your situation.
- If your issuer offers the option, consider temporarily disabling contactless payments while you seek guidance.
Changing a PIN alone should not be assumed to address a protocol-level contactless verification issue. Nor can a cardholder reliably identify an affected configuration from the card number, contactless symbol, terminal appearance or receipt. The research does not justify panic or replacing every EMV card as a precaution.
What merchants, acquirers and issuers should check
Responsibility is distributed across several layers, so remediation may not be controlled by one organization. Merchants can ask their acquirer or terminal provider whether contactless kernels and firmware are current, whether relevant dynamic authentication data is validated, and whether transactions that require stronger verification are routed for online authorization. Acquirers and issuers can review offline approvals and delayed clearing declines for patterns associated with terminals, merchants or transaction types, and confirm applicable dispute and liability rules.
A terminal firmware update, an acquirer configuration change, issuer fraud monitoring, a network protocol change and replacing a consumer card are different interventions. A merchant should obtain confirmation from its payment provider rather than infer protection from a terminal’s age, a PIN prompt or an approved receipt.
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Technical terms in brief
- EMV: A family of payment-card specifications and protocols used for chip and contactless transactions.
- CVM: Cardholder Verification Method—the method used to verify the person presenting the card, such as PIN, signature or device verification.
- CDCVM: Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method, such as biometric verification on a phone.
- CTQ and TTQ: Card Transaction Qualifiers and Terminal Transaction Qualifiers; information used in contactless flows to describe card and terminal capabilities or verification requirements.
- DDA and CDA: Dynamic Data Authentication and Combined Data Authentication, forms of dynamic card authentication.
- Application Cryptogram: Cryptographic transaction data used in EMV processing and checked by the issuer.
- Issuer and acquirer: The issuer provides the cardholder’s account; the acquirer connects a merchant to payment processing.
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