Securing online payment
In response to this problem, a consortium of European partners funded by the EC commenced the Financial Transactional Integrated Circuit Card Reader (FINREAD) project. It is the first time that seven European payment and card reader manufacturing companies have joined forces to combat this consumer crime. Since the FINREAD inception, a set of technical specifications for a new breed of intelligent smart card readers was established, resulting in Integrated Circuit (IC) technology for secure payment on the Internet. In the early days, the payment cards simply had a magnetic strip, but now as many as 50% of all cards are chip based. This is largely due to the Internet, which is becoming one of the potential key causes for the severe increases in banking fraud. For successful deployment, it was necessary to use open source specifications. As a result, the specifications are made freely accessible to smart card reader designers and manufacturers, ensuring FINREAD to further develop a universal PC connectable smart card reader. The technology behind the smart card coupled with the card reader, permits a remote server to download in a FINREAD reader and in a highly secure way a small applet that takes care of all security sensitive functions (e.g. PIN typing, display of sensitive information, access to the smart card, etc.) usually processed on an unsecured PC. Many different attempts have been made that aim at finding a common architecture, which will provide a secure interface for IC card readers. However, most of these potential solutions rely on proprietary – non-interoperable - developments provided by manufacturers This is not the case for the FINREAD card reader, because when connected to a PC, it will be able to handle all types of payment and other types of cards in one single physical unit. The same applet will run on any FINREAD compliant reader, independently of the manufacturer of the device. The FINREAD reader has also the ability to switch from the secure mode (the default setting), to the transparent mode for non-sensitive or non-compliant FINREAD applets. Additional benefits include, cardholder trust with Internet shopping, secure payment services for banks, standardised Point of Interaction devices for the mass market and secure retail payments on open networks.
