This question is for people who take and store credit card information for customers. Credit card companies, in an attempt to lessen fraud, are tightening the screws on merchants who take credit cards. One aspect of this is a requirement to store credit card information from customers encrypted. So let's say you have a customer whose credit card you keep on file, because they'll be charging other items with you. The credit card companies would like you to store this information with strong encryption, which in their mind is one-way encryption. Now let's say that the credit card number is part of the customer record. When looking at the customer record, you see just the last four digits of the card. But when editing the record or when printing out reports of things which must be charged, you will see the whole number. Assume the users of the system have logins and passwords. Now if you one-way encrypt the credit card numbers in the customer records, then it seems to me that any time that field has to be accessed (to edit the record or charge something to the card), you'd have to have the user enter a specific "password" to unlock the encryption. This would be quite in addition to their username and password. Moreover for this to be as secure as the credit card companies would like it, whatever "password" is used would need to be changed frequently, particularly at any change of personnel. This means you'd have to re-encrypt all the credit card numbers using the new "password" every few months or when you fire someone who had access to the data. This seems like an excessively cumbersome solution. Is this seriously the way it's done? Does anyone have a better solution? Paul -- Paul M. Foster -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
