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Ultrasonic Payments

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Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#61

Post by [deleted] »

sdrothrock wrote: post #31
anunay03 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awh, Can you give a idea of how much nuisance such devices can cause you daily? Also is there a way to prevent cochlear implants from detecting these frequencies? (like do only some cochlear implants do this or most of them do) I really wanna use tech like this sometimes in future, but I also wanna care about accessiblity.

I also have a cochlear implant; it doesn't allow me to hear ultrasonic frequencies -- in fact, my hearing range is still a subset of "normal."

[deleted]

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#62

Post by keeganpoppen »

irjustin wrote: post #16
muglug wrote: post #11

Reminds me of Clinkle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle ) which hoped to use sound to transmit payments.

Key difference, this one has demonstrated it working! Jokes aside, I'm sure Clinkle had something working in a demo form but obviously the problem is sound as a digital communication medium is terrible outside of specific use cases (air gap attacks?). Clinkle is up there in the who's who of blow ups.

re clinkle: i have definitely witnessed it working in person. not that that says anything in particular about clinkle. and yeah, knowing a lot of the people who worked there i definitely feel great delight and kinship with that particular blow up. and i worked at Color (Labs) for a bit, which, in terms of blow ups was like Clinkle before Clinkle, so i feel like i've had front row tickets to two of the best ones from that era! :)

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#63

Post by hgomersall »

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #41
hgomersall wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key exchange problem doesn't go away because you're using ultrasound.

Correct, although it's not that it goes away, more of a it has different properties. The short time I worked in the IOT space, I was a big proponent of exploring an option like this for bootstrapping the WIFI connection in a device that otherwise had just a button or two. The basic problem is, the wifi password needs to be shared with a device without an interface. The traditional method at the time was the device bo…

It feels to be that this is better solved with NFC. The hardware is in principle cheaper with NFC (certainly, cheaper transducers) and my understanding is nfc is more robust to snoopers - certainly ultrasound is explicitly broadcast.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#64

Post by Daegalus »

muglug wrote: post #11

Reminds me of Clinkle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle ) which hoped to use sound to transmit payments.

as someone who worked at Clinkle (on backend) we did indeed have this early on. it was one of the demos used during my interviews to show me the app. The feature used infrasound instead of ultrasound like this article.

unfortunately coffee grinders and such would mess with transmission. the sound engineer working on it also left shortly before I started so the feature never got fixed and eventually killed.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#65

Post by Daegalus »

irjustin wrote: post #16
muglug wrote: post #11

Reminds me of Clinkle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle ) which hoped to use sound to transmit payments.

Key difference, this one has demonstrated it working! Jokes aside, I'm sure Clinkle had something working in a demo form but obviously the problem is sound as a digital communication medium is terrible outside of specific use cases (air gap attacks?). Clinkle is up there in the who's who of blow ups.

we did have it. as a former Clinkle employee I can confirm we had infrasound payments in the app and backend support for it. (I was on backend)

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#66

Post by danuker »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #59
jrmann100 wrote: post #17

I'm reminded of Google Tone[0], which beamed URLs audibly to nearby browsers in an Airdrop-style experience. A neat trick, but ultimately useless given that most devices have less obtrusive ways of sharing data P2P. The ultrasonic aspect of this experiment makes the technology a lot more useful. Tone also came with the unfortunate side effect of Google software having constant access to your microphone. 0: https://ch…

> Tone also came with the unfortunate side effect of Google software having constant access to your microphone. In today's world, most phones or "smart" devices are also constantly listening; I want to believe they don't listen until the trigger phrase is uttered, which could also be implemented for these ultrasonic applications, but I'm not entirely convinced and them always listening is but a silent over-the-air up…

> I want to believe they don't listen until the trigger phrase is uttered

They can't know whether the phrase was uttered unless they constantly listen.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#67

Post by kybernetikos »

__alexs wrote: post #60
m-s wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you “steal” money from a contactless card or a phone?

1) Gain access to something like a Stripe Terminal ( https://stripe.com/gb/terminal ) You should probably avoid using your real identity here. 2) Type in a charge like $50 3) Discretely wave the device at your targets wallet 4) Repeat steps 2-3 as much as possible in a short amount of time. 5) Hope you can withdraw the funds before anyone notices. I don't think this is a wildly plausible attack and also at least here…

This attack (and some variants of it, e.g. fooling the proximity detection or man in the middle) work because the acknowledgement action that the user does is simply having the device nearby. This seems like a poor choice of acknowledgement action for something that transfers money. Payment devices should probably have a physical or soft button that you have to press to acknowledge payment.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#68

Post by zinekeller »

gkop wrote: post #29
zinekeller wrote: post #2

Interesting experiment, although it seems that most of Asia has settled on NFC (card emulation or token), QR, and 2D barcodes for offline (at least to customers) payments, which is more practical to deploy using existing infrastructure. I know Tez (aka Google Pay in India which was pushed in other countries) has implemented it, but Indians does Google Pay still have ultrasonic transfers?

Pedantic, but I believe QR is a type of 2D barcode, but your comment implies the contrary. Am I wrong?

Ugh, I definitely meant 1D barcodes of course, but you get the point.

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#69

Post by zinekeller »

anunay03 wrote: post #28
zinekeller wrote: post #2

Interesting experiment, although it seems that most of Asia has settled on NFC (card emulation or token), QR, and 2D barcodes for offline (at least to customers) payments, which is more practical to deploy using existing infrastructure. I know Tez (aka Google Pay in India which was pushed in other countries) has implemented it, but Indians does Google Pay still have ultrasonic transfers?

Google Pay in India no longer has any of those features. Infact it has been completely reworked to support UPI payments [1]. And it has completely transformed how payments happen. paymets happen directly from bank account to bank account regardlessof what app you're using (Samsung Pay, PhonePe, GPay, your bank's app). You can use QR codes or simple username@bank to make payments. I am not aware of any payment systems…

> I am not aware of any payment systems that support the use of NFC

I basically lumped the whole of Asia into a melting pot, whoops. While you're correct that India's UPI doesn't have an NFC mode, other countries do (NETS of Singapore and various systems in Japan for example).

Re: Ultrasonic Payments

#70

Post by anunay03 »

zinekeller wrote: post #69
anunay03 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Pay in India no longer has any of those features. Infact it has been completely reworked to support UPI payments [1]. And it has completely transformed how payments happen. paymets happen directly from bank account to bank account regardlessof what app you're using (Samsung Pay, PhonePe, GPay, your bank's app). You can use QR codes or simple username@bank to make payments. I am not aware of any payment systems…

> I am not aware of any payment systems that support the use of NFC I basically lumped the whole of Asia into a melting pot, whoops. While you're correct that India's UPI doesn't have an NFC mode, other countries do (NETS of Singapore and various systems in Japan for example).

Oh yea, I think I got the idea. The initial direction with apps like Tez too was trying to use NFC for payment. That just didn't catch on, which I'd probably pin on the fact that majority of population here uses low-mid range Smartphones which often skip over NFC support.
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