It's a man-in-the-middle attack. "The Internet's Biggest Security Hole" (the title of that first link) has been that interior relays have always been trusted even though they are not trustworthy.

"consumers hate tokens."

"Everyone wants to be the single federation platform for everyone else."

"Federation will never work. It won’t work because the single most important consumer Web applications in the world are scared of it. Banks hate the concept because it becomes a weakest link in the chain problem."

"Tokens don’t actually solve most security problems, like man-in-the-middle, phishing, and keystroke-logging malware."

"Oh yes, and finally, consumers are going to have to carry around 13 of them just to make sure they can log into whatever they need to log into since no one will federate."

"Global federation is nowhere near a solid concept in the consumer space, despite what the vendors will try to sell you."

"This is a long term problem. If you work on it and make any progress against it, you'll find yourself much smarter at the far end, than you were at the near end.

When I was in Norway about 5 years ago, I was there very close to the summer solstice. I was wandering around town at 2 o'clock in the morning and there was plenty of light out. You come to a sign that says New Minsk about 60 km and it points south.

And I ask the lady "what country is this?"

She scratched her head for a bit, and said "well I think its Norway"

I said "well who plows the roads?"

"well Norway does, but he have to pay them."

There is a triple boundary in this town that I was in between Norway, Finland and Russia.

But what I did there, was, I had a card about wallet size, I stuck it into a machine, I punched in four digits, and it gave me about 2,000 krone, whatever the hell that is.

Now there are a lot of participants in that transaction. When I put a card into that machine, punch in a pin, and it gurgles for awhile, and finally gives me, a fairly large amount of money. There are a lot of participants in that transaction. The bank that owned the machine that gave me the money, it gave some money away -- that bank wants it back. The pin is necessary to convince my own bank that I'm me. But I don't want my pin to be broadcast all over the world. My bank in the us, it hasn't really given out or taken in any money, really. But there is a lot of credits involved here. Somebody needs to charge somebody else for having more money available. Even though there was actually no cash transfer.

And the problem that I have in mind is
- who are all the participants in an ATM transaction?
- what do those participants need to satisfy their problems?
- how is that in fact done?

In a general way, does the atm system actually work in some reasonable sense? To which the answer is by the way: yes. The atm system damn well works. With extremely high reliability and accuracy. It surprises me. Its quite a bit different than voting machines.