Formal Models of Bank Cards for Free

Abstract

Learning techniques allow the automatic inference of the behaviour of a system as a finite state machine. We demonstrate that learning techniques can be used to extract such formal models from software on banking smartcards which - as most bank cards do - implement variants of the EMV protocol suite. Such automated reverse-engineering, which only observes the smartcard as a black box, takes little effort and is fast. The finite state machine models obtained provide a useful insight into decisions (or indeed mistakes) made in the design and implementation, and would be useful as part of security evaluations - not just for bank cards but for smartcard applications in general - as they can show unexpected additional functionality that is easily missed in conformance tests.