Even with careful use of credit cards, people can still fall prey to fraudsters and identity thieves. At the start of the holiday shopping season last year, about 40 million credit cards were compromised after they were swiped at Target stores.
A similar incident happened in September this year. A breach in Home Depot's payment system led to hackers obtaining 56 million credit card numbers.
Identity theft and fraud continue to be a bane among merchants and credit card holders, but a new method developed by a team of researchers could potentially put an end to this problem.
For their report published in the journal Optica on Dec. 15, Pepijn Pinkse from the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente and colleagues described a technology called quantum secure authentication (QSA). It involves using a strip of nanoparticles on a card making it impossible to hack.
The credit cards that are in use today use magnetic strips or embedded chips, which can be easily exploited by fraudsters. These credit cards can be easily copied and matched once hackers manage to get the data that were stored within them. With the quantum security system, however, the nanoparticle strip would give thieves a hard time.
With this technology, a laser would zap a few photons of light on the card's nanoparticle strip, creating a distinct pattern that would be improbable to crack. The system makes use of the quantum nature of photons through which photons can exist in more than one place at the same time, resulting in a pattern so complex and unique it could not be duplicated.
"Single photons of light have very special properties that seem to defy normal behavior," Pinkse said. "When properly harnessed, they can encode information in such a way that prevents attackers from determining what the information is."
A special hardware that is similar to the laser that was initially used to create the pattern would be required to read one of these special cards. Pinkse said that even if somebody knows how the card is built, the technology itself would prevent him from making a copy.
"QSA uses a key that cannot be copied due to technological limitations and is quantum-secure against digital emulation," the researchers wrote. "QSA does not depend on secrecy of stored data, does not depend on unproven mathematical assumptions, and is straightforward to implement with current technology.
