Skip to main content

CARTES considers questions of security

Ensuring the security of payment systems is essential to maintain consumer confidence. The conference track ‘EMV: Challenges and benefits’, looks at ways of improving that security. When a customer uses his payment card in a store, he expects that the system will be secure. The interaction between EMV payment cards and POS terminals is strictly controlled.
November 4, 2014 Read time: 2 mins

Ensuring the security of payment systems is essential to maintain consumer confidence.

The conference track ‘EMV: Challenges and benefits’, looks at ways of improving that security. When a customer uses his payment card in a store, he expects that the system will be secure. The interaction between EMV payment cards and POS terminals is strictly controlled.

However, despite the existence of many systems that encrypt the PAN moving between the card reader and the processing infrastructure, part of the PAN’s journey is still ‘en clair’ – unencrypted. Over the years, the industry has spent a great deal of time and money on enforcing compliance with PCI DSS across the payment industry. However, data breaches still happen.

Milos Dunjic, CTO, Cardis International, will present a new solution that implements PAN with format preserving encryption (FPE) inside the card’s EMV payment application and is fully under the card issuer’s control. The new system is said to be radically different from previous methods. The solution is said to be fully resistant to replay attacks, as it ensures that the PAN reference is valid for only a single transaction. Since POS terminals, merchant acquirer and payment network systems handle only a unique per transaction format preserving PAN references, this eliminates the danger of criminals stealing real PAN data and then using it in CNP payments. Following on from this presentation, Andreas Strobel, board member with the Smart Payment Association, will give a presentation that analyses the advantages and disadvantages of different implementations, reflecting different business models. He will assess the standardisation efforts for online payment using tokens.


‘End-to-end tokenisation of PAN between EMV-application/digital-wallet and issuer host’, 14:40-15:00, Room 3

‘A Secure Profile for Tokenization in E and M-Commerce’, 16:30-17:00, Room 3

Related Content

  • CARTES looks at privacy in the digital society
    November 3, 2014
    US whistleblower Edward Snowden made millions of people aware of just how closely governments are scrutinising their private affairs. Nobody objects to law enforcement agencies uncovering terrorists’ funding sources, but the idea that bureaucrats can look into ordinary citizens’ financial and personal affairs makes many uncomfortable. The thought that criminals can do the same is even more alarming.
  • Tunnel simulators vital for real world tunnel management
    January 23, 2012
    Guillaume Ponsar, tunnel safety engineer with Egis Road Operation, writes about the advantages to be gained from the use of tunnel simulators. Major tunnel disasters over the last decade and more have shown how swiftly and badly a simple crash or fire may evolve should the wrong actions be taken by control room operators or traffic managers. Global safety issues and the reactions of operations staff have now become the principal concerns for Operations and Maintenance (O&M) service providers. As a result, n
  • Tighten up on cyber security before hackers infiltrate ITS infrastructure
    October 19, 2015
    This year’s ITS World Congress in Bordeaux will have three sessions dedicated to cyber security and the issue will also be addressed under connected and automated vehicles categories. Jon Masters finds out why. American security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek attracted international press coverage recently when they demonstrated how they could hack into and take control of a vehicle from a remote laptop. While the implications are clearly serious for vehicle manufacturers, highway and transpor
  • New technologies enable increased collaboration, cooperation
    July 17, 2012
    The continued expansion of IP camera networks increases the availability of useful information. At the same time, the opportunity exists to increase inter-agency collaboration. This makes information management all the more necessary in the control room environment. But the transportation sector could do a lot to help itself by gaining a better idea up front of what and how it wants to do things, says Electrosonic's Karl Johnson.