the consortium made this technology in the form of the pin, or the chip. How did we get a chip anyway? Well, it all started by a consortium of companies, known as EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa. It is important to understand the technology a little bit. Now we are talking about blocking and whether it is needed in the wallet itself, or the other alternative is to add it, which is possible and we will talk about that. You would be concerned about whether you need to block that as part of personal risk evaluation that likely relates to where you live, how you travel, and likely if you have anyone who may want to harm you for some strange reason. There exist edge cases non-related to credit cards, for example, transit cards, access cards, et cetera, where sniffing could pick up that information. Stripes are the biggest weakness and as long as we have them on our credit cards as backup for merchants and terminals that have not converted to a chip reader system, this will increase the chances for theft of our information. The security is highest with a chip and pin with no stripe, and lowest with a card with just the stripe. A card can have a chip and pin with no stripe, a chip and signature, a swipe and pin, or just a swipe. These are not all the same and it is relevant to know what you have in your wallet. Before jumping into that topic, we need to talk about cryptography and dive into the different types of stripe, chip, and pin cryptography. If your card has a chip and a stripe on it, then its information can be stolen via several mechanisms, but it is due to the stripe and not the chip. The question we will be answering is, is building RFID protection into a wallet necessary? Well, we will hold off on that and address first a few things that will provide context as we answer this question, because simply, we cannot answer the question properly until we know how credit cards operate and the types of theft that occur on them. RFID is great and I use it almost every day along with NFC, which is another mechanism for near field communication, and that is what its name stands for. Many were confused with the message I gave and over that time it has created a lot of, I do not want to say controversy, but some conversation that deserves a follow-up.īut let me be clear that this is not about whether RFID is good, it is about wallets and whether or not you need to buy an RFID blocking wallet. Two years ago I published a video about the absurdity of RFID blocking that is built into wallets. RFID blocking material built into wallets is a total scam. (if you want to see all the features and how many cards and cash it can hold, please watch the video) And RFID blocking wallets are still a scam. In the end you might want to block RFID, but you won’t want to do it with a wallet. Let’s dive into the specifics of RFID history, technology, scanning, skimming, shimming and blocking. Do you need RFID card blocking wallets? NO, but is RFID sniffing a threat? Maybe, but not really.
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