The ware for July 2024 is an Ingenico Axium DX8000. I hadn’t had a chance to tear down a modern POS terminal myself, so it was pretty interesting to see all the anti-tamper traces built into the product (thank you jackw01 for sharing it!). I wonder how effective these are, and how they mitigate manufacturing variations to prevent false positives. It looks like they use some custom IC to drive the serpentine traces, so presumably the chips are smart enough to do a training phase that calibrates to the environment and they just look for a “delta” on key metrics to flag a problem. Every computer already has self-training drivers that respond to manufacturing variations (in the DDR busses and high speed comms cables such as HDMI, USB-C, Ethernet, etc.), so I imagine this is fairly solid technology.
Still can’t help but wonder if the terminals can be remote-DoS’d with a relatively simple device that radiates signals at the right frequency to activate the tamper triggers. Thankfully, I haven’t heard of such an exploit, yet.
Jacob Creedon had a strong first guess but Anon got the make and model almost exactly right, so I’ll give the prize to Anon. Congrats, email me for your prize!
I’ve sent the email. Thank you for the challenge.
got it! thanks for playing :)