A Security Analysis of the Danish Deposit Return System

The process that allows one to get rewarded for returning a container through reverse vending machines (RVM) involves people and technology. In fact, it typically sees a set of human parties (e.g. customers, cashiers) and technical parties (e.g., RVMs, databases, scanners) to collaborate in order to enable effective recycling. In this paper, we advance a formal treatment of the Danish Deposit Return System (DRS). We investigate the security of the ceremony that people are expected to perform in the context of DRS using field observation and automated reasoning tools. We give a particular focus to the security threats due to people interacting with the technology behind DRS. The findings of our investigation enable novel considerations of the ceremony weaknesses and make it possible to delineate potential mitigations.