Patent Application
20060179323
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for substitution of prompts for an encrypting PIN device, and more particularly, to a method for substitution of prompts for non-PIN entry.
2. Description of the Related Art
Point of Sale (POS) terminals of the type typically used by merchants permit holders of charge cards, credit cards, debit cards, and the like to make electronic payments for services and merchandise quickly and easily. With the advent of stored value cards and other smart card schemes, the use of POS terminals in some form is likely to increase dramatically over the next few decades. Indeed, as the feature set of POS terminals and associated peripheral devices increases, the use of POS terminals may largely supplant or even replace the use of cash and checks in many contexts.
For existing POS terminals used to process PIN (personal identification number) authenticated transactions, there is a need to upgrade the attached encrypting PIN pad devices, the associated peripheral device of the POS terminal, to meet new security requirements. The POS terminals are programmed to use a command set to communicate with the PIN pad device. However, the command set is not designed to work with the PIN pad devices meeting the latest industry standards for security. All prompts displayed by the device to cardholders must be securely stored in the PIN pad device and have been approved and authenticated for loading into the device by business entity responsible for the security of the device. The problem is incurred by upgrading these PIN pad devices and relates to maintaining compatibility with general display commands used by the existing POS terminals to display various messages to the cardholders. The applications resident in the existing terminals are to use general display commands that include the display information as a parameter of the command. The security is exposed to unauthorized use of these commands to instruct a cardholder to enter his PIN at a time when it can be illegally captured in clear text mode.
An objective of the present invention is to provide a method for substitution of prompts for an encrypting PIN device. The method basically allows an encrypting PIN device to work with the existing command set by accepting prompts that the device expects to receive and displaying prompts that are the approved substitutes for the received prompts.
To achieve the objectives, the present invention discloses a method for substitution of prompts for an encrypting PIN device. After receiving a general display command, the encrypting PIN device recognizes whether the prompt of the received command corresponds to any of the expected prompts stored in the device. If the received prompt matches an expected prompt, an approved prompt linked to the expected prompt is substituted for the expected prompt, and is displayed by the encrypting PIN device and numeric entry is allowed during the display of this prompt. On the contrary, the received prompt that is not recognized as an expected prompt is displayed but without any capability for numeric entry during the display of the unexpected prompt.
Before all aforesaid steps, each of the expected prompts to be accepted by the encrypting PIN device is linked to one of the approved prompts, and then the prompt loading command for each prompt is cryptographically authenticated. Finally, the authenticated prompt-loading commands are sent to the encrypting PIN device. The device verifies the authentication of each command and stores the prompt if the verification is successful.
The invention will be described according to the appended drawings in which:
As shown in Step 13, after the encrypting PIN device recognizes that the received prompt parameter corresponds to an expected prompt, the approved prompt linked to the expected prompt is substituted for the expected prompt. If there is no approved prompt for the expected prompt, the general display command is allowed without numeric entry capability. That is, the encrypting PIN device prohibits numeric entry during display if no approved prompt is linked to the expected prompt. Furthermore, the encrypting PIN device has no display in response to the expected prompt. On the contrary, the screen displays the approved prompt with numeric entry capability, as shown in Step 14.
Before all aforesaid steps, all prompts displayed by the encrypting PIN device to the user must be securely stored in the encrypting PIN device and have been approved and authenticated for loading into the same device by an approver, business entity. As shown in
The above-described embodiments of the present invention are intended to be illustrative only. Numerous alternative embodiments may be devised by persons skilled in the art without departing from the scope of the following claims.
