Jack Lloyd wrote: > The only reason this 'must' be true is because an anonymous and secure > payment system is a terror which thankfully our federal governments > and central banks protect us from. While Amazon and others obviously > like being able to build customer profiles of everyone, I don't doubt > that they would be perfectly willing to accept an anonymous payment as > long as the money is good (and, of course, that the transaction costs > are no more than a credit card and/or the order flow is sufficient > that it is worth building support for it).
in the mid-90s, the x9a10 financial standard working group had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments ... which resulted in the x9.59 standard http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959 in the same timeframe, the EU (in conjunction with eu-dpd) made statements that electronic payments at point-of-sale should be as anonymous as cash. this was interpreted as meaning that names should be removed from payment cards (plastic and magstripe). the contention was that (because of poor authentication) retail outlets could cross-check names on the cards against some other form of "ID". the implication that removing names might help promote other integrity measures. in the x9.59 standard, we claimed that the improved integrity allowed meeting the EU-DPD objectives. We also claimed that x9.59 was privacy agnostic i.e. it allowed for privacy. The "ALL" requirement given to the x9a10 financial standard working group met internet, face-to-face, point-of-sale, electronic commerce. It also met debit, credit, ACH, as well as stored-value cards ... aka the same X9.59 was applicable to *ALL*. In the debit/credit scenario some countries have "know your customer" mandates associating account numbers with individuals ... which we claimed was outside the x9.59 standard. Supposedly with appropriate regulated access to information, govs can obtain information associating account activity with individuals. However, the very same x9.59 standard also works with stored-value/gift cards ... which doesn't have similar "know your customer" mandates. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#privacy And in fact, most stored-value/gift cards share a lot of the same exact processing with the debit/credit processing ... the addition of x9.59 could provide for the exactly same level of integrity thruout debit, credit, and stored-value/gift processing. for other drift, in the mid-90s ... there were some of the other payment efforts specifically for the internet which had so much payload and processing bloat that it made it impractical past the toy demo stage http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#bloat related recent post on infrastructure provisioning and bloat of toy demos: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#64 folklore indeed about the same time, there were completely different chip card oriented efforts for point-of-sale. one of the scenarios of some of the chipcard pilot projects in the late 90s and early part of this century was that they managed to increase the vulnerabilities (magstripe vis-a-vis chipcards) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard the common excuse from the period, was that chips cost so much that it wasn't possible to afford integrity that actually improved over magstripe. The other possible observation was that some of the chipcard efforts were so chip myopic ... that they couldn't realize that they were actually making it worse for the overall infrastructure. A big issue for merchants isn't anonymous payments ... it is cost of doing business. This has been in the news quite a bit recently in the form of interchange fees ... recent posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#62 folklore indeed the other area is in the liability related to breaches (and/or the costs of countermeasures to breaches). i've mentioned before that we had been called in to consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payments on their server. They had this technology they called SSL and it is frequently now referred to as electronic commerce http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway and then we got dragged into involved with the x9a10 financial standard. as part of attempting to meet the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments ... we did some detailed threat and vulnerability analysis. A big item that came out were infrastructure vulnerabilities ... breaches, skimming, harvesting, evesdropping, ... a whole slew of things. we identified that much of the vulnerability could be attributed to the account number and transaction information has diametrically opposing requirements ... 1) it has to be readily available for large number of different business processes and 2) since the crooks can use the same information for various kinds of essentially replay attacks ... the information has to be kept confidential and never divulged. we've also talked about this as the dual-use nature of the information ... and that even if the planet was buried under miles of (information hiding) encryption, it still wouldn't be able to prevent information leakage. So another part of the x9.59 financial standard was to eliminate the dual-use nature of the information, making it useless for crooks ... aka x9.59 didn't do anything to prevent information leakage ... it just eliminated the information leakage as a vulnerability. a related recent post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#74 folklore indeed from this stand-point ... the x9.59 financial standard addresses both drastically reducing fraud in the infrastructure as well as drastically reducing the infrastructure costs for fraud countermeasures. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]