Online Payment Gateways can now protect their merchants and end customers by adding support for Chip Shield’s direct to gateway encryption.

Chip Shield can establish an end-to-end encrypted channel from the card reader to the payment gateway before the customer submits a payment to a merchant using the gateway.

Instead of passing live credit card information through the merchant website, a card mapping token that looks like a valid card # is submitted.

The payment gateway uses this mapping token to look up the actual payment information that was sent over the direct to gateway encrypted channel.

This support can be added without any changes to the merchant web sites and eliminates the risk of credit card theft for every site your end customers visit.

How It Works – Direct to Gateway Encryption

The image above gives an overview of the direct to gateway encryption and token mapping process.  This requires that the merchant’s payment gateway integrates the card mapping token into their existing card processing.

Step 1 – The Chip Shield Reader interacts with the card EMV chip to generate an EMV Cryptogram.   The original card number is encrypted in the Chip Shield reader and passed to the browser extension.

Step 2 – The original card # and EMV Cryptogram is sent from the browser to the payment gateway in encrypted format.

Step 3 – The payment gateway creates a mapping token that looks like a valid card # and can be used to look up the original card #.

Step 4 – The card mapping token is submitted on the merchant’s website and processed by the merchant normally.

Step 5 – The gateway uses the mapping token to look up the actual payment and submits the original card # to the card network for processing.

The gateway knows that the card was present for the transaction and can loosen it’s authorization rules to prevent a false decline.

This process is transparent to the customer and the online merchant and only takes a couple of seconds to complete.