Formal Analysis of the EMV Protocol Suite

This paper presents a formal model of the EMV (EuropayMasterCard-Visa) protocol suite in F# and its analysis using the protocol verification tool ProVerif [4] in combination with FS2PV [3]. The formalisation covers all the major options of the EMV protocol suite, including all card authentication mechanisms and both onand offline transactions. Some configuration parameters have to be fixed to allow any security analysis; here we follow the configuration of Dutch EMV banking cards, but the model could easily be adapted to other configurations. As far as we know this is the first comprehensive formal description of EMV. The convenience and expressivity of F# proved to be a crucial advantage to make the formalisation of something as complex as EMV feasible. Even though the EMV specs amount to over 700 pages, our formal model is only 370 lines of code. Formal analysis of our model with ProVerif is still possible, though this requires some care. Our formal analysis does not reveal any new weaknesses of the EMV protocol suite, but it does reveal all the known weaknesses, as a formal analysis of course should.