Category Archives: payments

Online and Mobile Banking Fusion

Banks simplify access to our bank accounts. They keep relaxing security while hoping to replicate the boiling frog story. The trouble is that no-one dies and someone will figure out – sooner rather than later.

Debit-cards

I touch on a few things: using online banking to find valid card numbers, and date of birth, increasing chances for unauthorised access, lowering security of login credentials and changing role of debit cards.

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Tokenisation – Introduction

Tokenisation is a hot topic as it makes card processing cheaper and more secure. The goal is to replace your card number with a random number that is hard to use for unauthorised transactions – and it removes the need to encrypt databases.

What we are primarily looking at now are mobile payments but we are designing solutions for e-commerce as well. Payment processing involves re-encryption of PINs (PIN-blocks) for card-present transactions.

PIN_reencryption-min

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Card Payments and The Cloud

We are now integrating encryption into a corporate infrastructure and it made me think about payments and PCI audits. PCI stands for Payment Card Industry. Anyone who got close enough to e-commerce, or card payments knows what a burden it is on running a business.

Sooo, I have spent some time this week thinking about architectures for “technical security systems”. I could say “cryptography” straight away, I guess. Thinking about protecting sensitive data that may be subject of independent audits.

The scope of PCI audits is given by storage and processing of credit card numbers and PINs (in case of Chip&PIN systems). Once you experience the pain, you definitely want to get “out of scope”. This is true for merchants just as banks.

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