- Nachrichten zum Thema Sicherheit
- Security Technology
- Next-Gen Payment Processing Architectures
A rapidly increasing number of people make payments through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. They purchase apps, music, consumer goods, and a wide array of other products and services. Using traditional credit cards or even contactless cards, these payments are often at risk of attack.
For example, the reality is that credit cards cannot prevent Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal attacks. The chip-on-card makes it extremely difficult for criminals to manufacture counterfeit credit cards using stolen data thus reducing counterfeit and lost or stolen card fraud. But that doesn’t protect these cards from other types of attacks, particularly those that look to steal data during a transaction.
One common contactless attack is the relay attack. The attack chain consists of:
Relay attack against RFID payment cards
The mole emits radio frequency energy and powers the RFID chip on the card being attacked. The proxy interacts with the PoS terminal and forwards commands to the card via the mole. The mole captures the card’s responses and sends them back to the proxy, which then forwards it to the PoS terminal. Encryption does not protect against this type of attack because this is capturing an existing data transfer, with the mole and the proxy relaying data.
There are currently three primarily architectures that promote a next-generation solution to secure mobile payment. These are encryption plus tokenization, cloud-based PoS systems, and secure element systems.
This payment architecture encrypts and tokenizes the credit card data, thus making credit card data theft virtually impossible for the cybercriminals.
The processing workflow is as follows:
How encryption plus tokenization works
This system ensures that the actual credit card data is never present in device memory or in any other system on the merchant’s end. Stolen tokens cannot be used to create counterfeit credit cards and cannot be used in card-not-present transactions.
With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) becoming popular, there is an increasing shift towards cloud based PoS systems. Cloud PoS systems provide merchants with a low cost, feature rich, flexible, and secure payment transaction system.
There are a number of advantages to using cloud PoS that are convincing merchants to make the switch, including:
This architectural solution uses a secure element to process credit card transactions.
In this system, the credit card information is read by the PoS terminal and sent directly to a secure element, which Intel calls Protected Applet (PA), bypassing the PoS software. The PA manages all transaction processing requests with the banks and can be configured to share certain data with the PoS software. Moving all credit card processing actions to the secure element and completely bypassing the RAM ensures the sensitive data cannot be stolen by RAM Scraper malware. The secure element is designed to be tamper resistant and cannot be infected by malware.
These solutions represent the best prospects for secure payment transactions in the near future. While they are more secure than existing mobile payment methods, they have certain features that still have the potential for attacks.
[MORE: Next-Gen Payment Processing Technologies: What They Are, and How They Work]
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