Payment Tokenization via Secure Server for PCI Burden Reduction
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing tokenization methods in credit card and financial transactions have limitations in functionality, leading to high costs and complexity in complying with security standards like PCI DSS, and there is a need for improved systems to process financial payments securely without exposing sensitive account information.
Innovation Solution
A secure server stores financial account information and provides a token to the merchant's server, allowing the merchant to process payments using the token without directly handling the sensitive data, thus reducing compliance costs and security risks.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If merchants store and process credit card data directly on their systems, then they can process payments efficiently, but they incur high PCI compliance costs and face increased security risks
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts sensitive credit card data from the merchant's system environment and stores it in a separate, PCI-compliant tokenization environment. Only tokenized representations of card data remain on merchant systems, eliminating the need for merchants to maintain PCI compliance infrastructure while preserving payment processing capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a tokenization service as an intermediary between the merchant system and cardholder data. This intermediary service handles the secure storage and management of sensitive data, allowing merchants to process payments without directly handling or storing actual card information, thus reducing compliance burden.
2Reliability
If merchants implement comprehensive security measures to comply with PCI standards, then data security is improved, but operational costs and implementation complexity increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent removes the burden of implementing and maintaining complex security infrastructure from merchants by extracting sensitive data handling responsibilities to a specialized tokenization service. Merchants only need to integrate tokenization APIs, dramatically simplifying compliance implementation while maintaining high security standards.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates tokenized copies of cardholder data that can be used for payment processing without requiring merchants to store or handle actual sensitive information. These tokens serve as functional substitutes that maintain payment capabilities while eliminating security compliance complexity.
3Object-affected harmful factors
If a single security breach occurs in merchant systems, then customer trust is maintained, but millions of credit card accounts can be compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts cardholder data from merchant systems where it would be vulnerable to breaches and stores it in a secure, isolated tokenization environment. Even if merchant systems are compromised, attackers cannot access actual card data since only tokenized representations exist on merchant systems, fundamentally reducing fraud risk from security breaches.
Data Source
AI summary
Processing a payment transaction from a payer (operating a payer computing system) to a payee (operating a merchant computing system) by a secure computing system. The secure computing system outputs a financial account registration request form to the payer computing system (e.g., within a window or frame that is displayed within an ecommerce webpage provided by the merchant computing system) for the payer to provide sensitive financial account information, securely stores the sensitive financial account information, maintains compliance with an information security standard (e.g., a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and provides a non-sensitive electronic data token representing the sensitive financial account information to the merchant computing system. The merchant computing system can then process the payment transaction using the sensitive financial account information represented by the non-sensitive electronic data token without actually receiving—and, therefore, having to secure—the underlying sensitive financial account information.