24 ms·

Accepting payments is getting harder

225 points by jaredtobin 11y ago

dbreaker 11y ago
nice recap
jackreichert 11y ago
Unless you're in the business of money, you shouldn't really be doing it yourself, so the important TLDR is: > Obviously it’s not fun living in that fear, which is why I believe that services like Stripe, that help you out with these issues, will thrive.
dangrossman 11y ago
I always recommend people build their payments on Spreedly (https://spreedly.com/ https://spreedly.com/). It checks off the boxes for minimizing PCI scope; you store no payment information, and collect none on your website either. You can either do a transparent redirect (your payment form points to a URL on their domain, which redirects back to your site with a token) or an iframe. Once you collect payment information, which they tokenize and store, you can run charges/auths/refunds against it using any of 81 different payment processors and gateways. Balanced one day, Stripe the next, and whatever startup is popular after them in a year -- without changing any of your payment code.
- aethr 11y ago
  Does anyone know if using transparent redirects actually waives your responsibilities for PCI compliance? Even though the credit card details aren't sent to your backend, they are still collected on a form hosted on your infrastructure. If your servers are compromised and malicious JS is added to your payment form, couldn't an attacker siphon credit card details via AJAX? It seems like the PCI documentation always uses terminology like "sites that collect credit card data", which I think sounds broad enough to include sites that use transparent redirects.
  - mirashii 11y ago
    It's generally transparent redirects in the other direction. You load JS from their servers, the form posts to their servers, redirects back to yours. Often even the form isn't hosted on your infrastructure, but instead embedded into your page through some JS that is hosted elsewhere. If your responsibilities weren't waived or significantly lessened, I'd imagine companies like Stripe would be significantly less successful.
    - aethr 11y ago
      You generally don't need to load any JS from the payment processor to use a transparent redirect, although I'm sure some work this way. Transparent redirects just require setting the form action property on your payment page to a URL on the processor's site. The processor then silently redirects back to the next step in your process. Using an embedded payment form also shouldn't require any JS, as it is usually done using an iframe. This method should be safe, as the same-origin policy in the iframe would prevent JS on your domain from interacting with form elements in the iframe. But this is not typically what people are talking about when they talk about a transparent redirect.
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    As of PCI-DSS v3 (January 2015), a transparent redirect qualifies you for SAQ A-EP, which is 100+ questions along with quarterly scans and annual pentesting. Basically, your website is "in scope" for securing. The iframe option still qualifies you for SAQ A, which is the short questionnaire without scanning/testing requirements.
chrisfosterelli 11y ago
This is a fantastic example of why companies like Stripe are going to come out ahead. Other companies are basically telling you "deal with it", while Stripe is giving you documentation and rewriting their software for it.
- amelius 11y ago
  Well, it is not so simple because if the payment is required to run on a separate page, then Stripe's api has to change, I suppose.
sjtgraham 11y ago
> The worst offenders however are the requirements that some businesses simply cannot comply with unless they have some serious cash laying around. Examples of this are >> Quarterly external vulnerability scans must be performed by an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV), approved by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). > and >> Is external penetration testing performed per the defined methodology, at least annually, and after any significant infrastructure or application changes to the environment (such as an operating system upgrade, a sub-network added to the environment, or an added web server)? Have you ever had a penetration test done? They basically run a load of OSS automated tools, generate a PDF report, and then charge you $1000s. It gives you no real insight and reveals nothing unless you've been a total noob. Why is this so expensive? Broadening of PCI scope + needlessly expensive compliance = Smells like a large opportunity.
- metaverse 11y ago
  We went through a SAQ D Service Provider 3.0, and paying for an ASV didn't hurt nearly as much as filling out that 80 page questionnaire... In fact, it reminded us apply some recent CVE's to our system before taking it to production. We used Comodo HackerGuardian which is $250/y, so you don't have to pay $1000s.
  - akshatpradhan 11y ago
    I think my tool can actually help you. You document all your procedures in an organized structure using Github flavored markdown. http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/software-development-process-sdlc http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/softw... We're becoming the true Turbo Tax for compliance.
    - tomjen3 11y ago
      You probably have a good tool, but I am not even going to take a look at it when it doesn't have its own url. herokuapp just screams weekend project.
gfosco 11y ago
Accepting payments is getting easier, because companies like Stripe will handle the burden of security and compliance.
- ique 11y ago
  Definitely easier "on the whole" compared to 10 years ago, but harder compared to last year.
tptacek 11y ago
Good. There's no love lost between me and companies that make significant money doing PCI assessments (they tend to be the bottom-feeding remora of the infosec economy), but the one criticism you could not level against the PCI certification program over the last 10 years is that it was too hard to get certified. Use Stripe. Move on.
- shard972 11y ago
  Well what about grattipay then? I think it's pretty obvious with their latest blog post that it's not just as easy as moving onto stripe and your done.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  What happens when the iframe allowance is removed, and not even using Stripe can save you from the credit card companies? This seems like a transparent plan to make PCI assessors more money.
  - csirac2 11y ago
    Woah. Precisely the reason that card networks and issuers have been so lax previously is that they want consumers and issuers to use their damn cards. Being painful to use for merchants and consumers is incompatible with that. Until now losses were small enough... Now, PCI assessment industry is such a profoundly small thing next to the losses and risk carried by issuers - let alone the sheer core business volumes at stake here - forgive me for feeling skeptical that the reasons for this security bump are anything other than stakeholders wanting to stem losses and reduce risk.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Wouldn't that happen by just making rules that led to people using third-party services, though? Why is it a requirement that you change users' passwords every 90 days (something which I outright don't want to do), or get audited once a year (which is a considerable expense for no actual feedback, other than running an automated tool)?
joshwa 11y ago
I have to have a new pen test every time I "add a web server"?
- akshatpradhan 11y ago
  You have to pentest only 1) if the web server touches sensitive data and 2) if the sensitive web server being deployed is configured differently from all the other sensitive web servers in that same sensitive environment. If you're just adding web96 and its configured exactly like web01 through web95, then it doesn't need pen testing.
dperfect 11y ago
Stripe plans to use the iFrame "loophole" to enable Stripe.js customers to qualify under SAQ A-EP as mentioned on their website[1]: > The new version of Stripe.js meets these criteria by performing all transmission of sensitive cardholder data within an iframe served off of a stripe.com domain controlled by Stripe. Can someone help me understand how this is practically any more secure than the way Stripe.js currently works? It sounds like the intention of the iFrame exception[2] is to allow a payment form to be loaded, completed, and submitted to a compliant server all within a visible iFrame. From what I can tell, the "compliant" version of Stripe.js just submits the data (similar to the traditional way) via an invisible iFrame - the form is still hosted and completed on the (likely) non-compliant server. If that's the case, then I'd expect the "loophole" to go away soon and current Stripe.js users will have to adopt a payment flow similar to Stripe Checkout; in other words, it will be obvious that Stripe (a third party) is being used because the end user will be interacting with a form (or part of a form) completely hosted on Stripe's servers. For companies using Stripe to avoid PCI compliance with self-hosted payment forms, this essentially transforms Stripe into another PayPal checkout-style service. [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-about-pci-dss-3-0 https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-about-pci-dss-3-0 [2] https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding_SAQs_PCI_DSS_v3.pdf https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding...
- sologoub 11y ago
  PCI DSS and SAQs are in the end written by lawyers. There are many weird things there that don't really make that much sense. Unfortunately, in that space, you have to play by those rules...
- matthewarkin 11y ago
  I'm actually working on a blog post about this, basically the argument is whether or not you use Stripe.js and the invisible iframe and Stripe Checkout is that as soon as you have some malicious JS in your DOM all bets are off, and while stealing credit card info from Stripe Checkout may be harder than just doing $("#credit-card-number").value, its not /that/ much harder. (As part of my blog post, I actually use some malicious js on the merchant site to steal card info from a Braintree iframe (the drop in))
Animats 11y ago
This is good. People are getting fed up with replacing their credit card every six months because some online retailer had a breach. You can outsource payment processing to Stripe, Paypal, Square, Yahoo Store, etc. There's no reason every web merchant should see credit card numbers. Stripe is in Visa's doghouse right now.[1] Their entry on the Visa Global Registry of Service Providers has turned yellow, with an expiration date of Mar 31, 2015. This means they're having some PCI compliance problem.[2] Visa gradually cranks up penalties until the problem is fixed, or, after about 9 months, just pulls the plug. Visa says Square and PayPal are OK right now. Yahoo is also in the yellow doghouse. (If you're a Stripe or a Yahoo Store merchant, they were supposed to inform you that Visa put them in the doghouse, so you can change vendors. Did they?) [1] http://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do http://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do [2] http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/Bulletin-PCIENFORCE-102214.pdf http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/Bulletin-PCIENFORCE-1...
- ique 11y ago
  > There's no reason every web merchant should see credit card numbers. The heightened requirements are actually for when you are using services that _don't_ let the merchant see the CC number. Like the "old" Stripe.js.
  - eps 11y ago
    Do elaborate ... And what is old/new stripe.js ?
    - andreyf 11y ago
      > they are changing Stripe.js to now serve up the data in an iFrame so you can keep using their product more or less like before but without heightened requirements I imagine they're changing things to be like Google Wallet, where you use a pop-out window to type your credit card number into (just the first time, it's save on their side after). That way you know you're giving your CC just to google.com by looking at the URL of the new window. Stripe's current JS-based version has better UX, but it's a little scary if the merchant whose site you're entering your card into has no legal security requirements. On the other hand, it's a purely theoretical problem afaik - I haven't heard of any breaches resulting from merchants which use JS third party payment solutions having their websites hacked to serve up bad JS.
akshatpradhan 11y ago
This is great that HN is talking about PCI. The problem with PCI and compliance in general is three fold. 1. People don't want compliance [1] 2. People think compliance is broadly applied 3. People don't know where to start I'll answer these point by point. 1) The reason people don't want compliance is because the security industry claims that Compliance is bare minimum and not enough. If they told you that Compliance was simply doing your due diligence on your sensitive devices, I think the market would have had a software tool to easily get us through the process by now. (I built a "brilliant" PCI tool btw. Link below) So let me explain to them why I think Compliance is just doing your due diligence and we'll do that by simply asking this question: If compliance is bare minimum and not enough, what is a comprehensive approach available right now to reasonably protect our sensitive data? The security professionals will tell you Risk Assessments and Pentesting often is the best alternative [2] Their answer is to specifically switch to Risk Assessment and PenTesting often, which is Requirement 11 and Requirement 12 of PCI. Each one of the bullets written is specifically covered by PCI DSS 3.1, including social engineering/phishing attacks that are provided through security awareness training. They're telling me that compliance is bare minimum, yet their suggestion is to do a subset of compliance. Its circular logic. Since its circular logic and nobody has been able to provide me with a reasonable approachable alternative to going above bare minimum, I hypothesize that compliance is NOT bare minimum, but in fact, due diligence. Think of a fort. Forts had defined compliance checklists in the old times. In a fort, you go through a security rotation of making sure the pot of boiling oil tips over on time. You practice your smoke signaling so that the appropriate people are notified in the event of a wall breach. Were they spending a majority of their security drills taking half their army, launching it against the fort, fixing what fails, and then doing a risk assessment? 2) A compliance program by definition is only applicable to your sensitive environment. It cannot be applied broadly. Its forcing you to go through the decision making process of asking yourself, "What's most important to protect right now". Only you can classify the sensitivity of your devices. Only you can choose if your code base is sensitive or your employee's SSN is sensitive. But whatever you’ve classified as sensitive must fall under compliance. Let's refresh: Compliance is designed to be applied only to your sensitive data. If you choose to put a non-sensitive devices under a compliance program, then you've specifically applied compliance broadly. 3) To approach any compliance program, ask yourself 6 questions on any specific device. 1. Does this device store, process or transmit sensitive data (e.g. cardholder/health/SSN)? 2. Is there unrestricted access between this device and a sensitive device? 3. Does this device provide authorization, authentication, or access control to a sensitive device? 4. Can this device initiate a connection to a sensitive device? 5. Can a sensitive device initiate a connection to this device? 6. Can this device administer a sensitive device? If you're able to answer yes to any of those questions then your device is sensitive and due diligence is required. Let's go back to the fort example. Is there unrestricted access from that boiling pot to the sensitive gold chamber? Does the pot provide access control to the sensitive gold chamber? If yes, then configuration settings of the pot, pulley, oil, need to be recorded and monitored periodically. If no, then its possible that you might have a business justification for not putting as much rigor into recording and monitoring the correct functionality of that pot. You've already started the compliance process by asking yourself, "Does my laptop initiate an outbound connection to a sensitive device?" If yes, then your laptop falls under compliance and due diligence is required. Everything else is just record keeping. Create a network diagram of only your sensitive assets. Write down how you rotate your keys on those sensitive assets. Write down what log files you periodically review. Go through a practice run of your Incident Response in case there is a breach of your sensitive asset. This is a pretty long post and I hope it helped. Shameless plug, I'm building a tool called ComplianceChimp to guide you through this entire process including recording your procedures with Github flavored Markdown. You can see how I'm using our tool to get us through the PCI Compliance process. [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510435 [2] https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129 https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129 [3] http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/software-development-process-sdlc http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/softw...
borski 11y ago
For what it's worth, PCI compliance as it stands today is complete BS. It provides a false sense of security and most of the PCI ASVs are the scourge of infosec. I can't tell you how many customers we have that use the cheapest possible PCI ASV for "compliance," but then use us in addition for "real security," despite the fact that we aren't an ASV. We've intentionally stayed away from becoming one thus far, actually, because that is a whole political game in itself. [1] The new requirements are better. Stringent and hard to comply with, but better. The real solution, as I see it, is to build automated security testing into your SDLC / Dev process. Penetration tests, when done by a good firm like Matasano, are incredibly useful, but lose their value the next time you push code. Building tools like Tinfoil into your CI process makes sure you don't get owned between pen tests. PCI is unfortunately written by political minds and lawyers, not engineers or infosec folk. This is an unpopular comment, but is true in my estimation. Comply because you must, but please don't treat it as the end-all be-all. Care about your customers' data just a little bit more. [1] http://bretthard.in/2013/01/the-pci-asv-process-sucks/ http://bretthard.in/2013/01/the-pci-asv-process-sucks/
- akshatpradhan 11y ago
  TinFoil, I remember I invited you to speak at the Boston Security Meetup several years ago! >The real solution, as I see it, is to build automated security testing into your SDLC / Dev process. Penetration tests, when done by a good firm like Matasano, are incredibly useful, but lose their value the next time you push code. Building tools like Tinfoil into your CI process makes sure you don't get owned between pen tests. This is false because you're suggesting that security testing of your SDLC, a subset of the compliance program is a more diligent solution than the entire compliance program. I explain myself in a comment below and I'd be glad to debate with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510369
  - borski 11y ago
    Ha, good to see you here. I'm not suggesting that there is absolutely no value to any of PCI. The fact that it forces you to think about security at all is already of some value. However, I am saying that passing a PCI audit is incredibly easy as compared to thorough automated testing, and especially compared to a (good) manual penetration test. Because you can pass a PCI audit relatively easily, people will do that and think it's enough, when in reality there is far more they should be doing to protect their customers. Should you not do PCI? No, of course you should, as it's required by the processors. Is PCI going to protect you from getting breached? No, it's not enough, and you shouldn't pretend it is. If you have to pick exactly /one/ thing to do in addition to (or instead of) PCI, building thorough automated security testing into your SDLC process is it.
Silhouette 11y ago
As a small business taking card payments, we're far more concerned about the absurd rate of failure of perfectly legitimate charges than anything PCI-DSS say. We lose more customers to Stripe charges failing than any other reason, by a considerable margin, and it seems even Stripe don't actually know why because it's organisations further down the line making these decisions. The whole card payments industry is broken, and the sooner the growing direct payments industry kills off the credit card giants, the better.
mrweasel 11y ago
It's only getting harder if you have "inline" payment. Honestly I'm glad to see that go away. We always used "hosted payment page" solution, it's safer, and we've been expecting tougher rules for some time. If you want to talk about online payment becoming harder, you should address the increasing number of payment options that online stores need to support. Adding to debit and credit cards are bank transfers (which is different in every country), PayPal, invoicing, part-payments, financing, and an almost unlimited number of local option.
- deleted 11y ago
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cm2187 11y ago
We should have moved a long time ago to vendor specific credit card numbers (ecommerce isn't exactly a new activity). Say I get from my bank a token which I provide to this vendor, and the first time the vendor uses it to accept a payment, the token locks in to that vendor, i.e. my bank will not allow any payment with this token to another vendor (i.e. to another bank account). Then it doesn't matter if it's stolen, only that vendor can use it anyway. And I could have the option to tell my bank to make it a single use token, or to cancel a multiple use token or to set a payment cap to that token. That doesn't seem very complex to implement and would alleviate the vast majority of the credit card related problems. I am sure it can be made simpler, have a protocol with redirects to the bank's website that eliminate the need for the client to copy-paste a token, or to have another mechanism with similar effects. Banks are one of these many industries that don't seem to get technology. They employ massive IT and developer staff but are run by people who don't get it (and to make things worse, are most of the time massive bureaucracies which means that even when they know what they need to do they just can't execute).
- nmridul 11y ago
  This is similar to how bank payment is working in India. When I make payment on seller website, it redirects me to the bank website. I enter my credentials (including phone based or device based OTP) to confirm the payment and its done. And there is also option to make easy subscriptions.
  - sumedh 11y ago
    Subscription based payments dont work in India though, which sucks.
- fragmede 11y ago
  Bank of America has ShopSafe which allows you to generate a temporary credit card number to use with the sketchy online merchant that has the particular gadget I want to buy. Their implementation leaves much to be desired, but it's a step in the right direction.
  - 11y ago
ukigumo 11y ago
Well, I guess it won't hurt if I offer my services for PCI guidance for startups here :-) One thing to keep in mind is that PCI is a bare-minimum of security "best practices" that aims at validating that a company transacting with payment cards has an understanding of data classification and protection.
- akshatpradhan 11y ago
  If compliance is bare minimum and not enough, what is a comprehensive approach available right now to reasonably protect our sensitive data? The security professionals will tell you Risk Assessments and Pentesting often is the best alternative [1] Their answer is to specifically switch to Risk Assessment and PenTesting often, which is Requirement 11 and Requirement 12 of PCI. Each one of the bullets written is specifically covered by PCI DSS 3.1, including social engineering/phishing attacks that are provided through security awareness training. They're telling me that compliance is bare minimum, yet their suggestion is to do a subset of compliance. Its circular logic. Since its circular logic and nobody has been able to provide me with a reasonable approachable alternative to going above bare minimum, I claim that compliance is NOT bare minimum, but in fact, due diligence. Think of a fort. Forts had defined compliance checklists in the old times. In a fort, you go through a security rotation of making sure the pot of boiling oil tips over on time. You practice your smoke signaling so that the appropriate people are notified in the event of a wall breach. Were they spending a majority of their security drills taking half their army, launching it against the fort, fixing what fails, and then doing a risk assessment? [1] https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129 https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129
  - ukigumo 11y ago
    The most comprehensive approach is to have an InfoSec policy portfolio which permeates into every corner of your organisation and dictates secure operating behaviours and mandates logical and physical security practices. This will include regular vulnerability scans on your code, your application stack and your infrastructure but it will also include instructions on how to classify data and how to handle data according to that classification. Compliance is a achieved by marking a checklist which is why is fairly easy to botch it up. Sure you can do a subset of the checklist and have compensating controls for everything you've missed but the risk of non-compliance is not being able to do business (at best) and jail time (at worst) so you tell me what is your motivation to fail to meet the bare minimums of security best practices in card payment industry, aka, PCI-DSS. Think of a castle; It will have several walls, towers, heavy doors, guards etc. It will also be placed in a hill, a mount or otherwise hard to access area (never in a vale for instance). It will also have the largest possible distance between the treasure hall and the front door. The threats your castle faces will continuously evolve, and the walls that stood up against bows and arrows are useless against turrets or cannons, so if you want to keep your treasure you do your best to be one step ahead and you don't get that by making sure your original walls are still in place or any other base requirements are still met.
jpatokal 11y ago
Every time legacy payment processors ratchet up compliance requirements, cryptocurrencies get another little boost. And while it's easy to forget in the US, where credit cards are handed out in boxes of cereal, getting a credit card is an insuperable hurdle of much of the world's population, eg. the estimated 75% of Indians who work in the informal economy and thus can't prove (or don't have) regular income.
jasonisalive 11y ago
The problem of credit cards is that when you make a payment, you have to give away your private key. No amount of securitisation will take away this fundamental flaw. This is one of Bitcoin's evolutionary advantages in this space. To send money with Bitcoin, there is no need to expose one's private key. A massive corporation could take millions of annual payments and their paying customers needn't be concerned about their money being at risk. If the entity has poor security, the only people they endanger are themselves.
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sageabilly 11y ago
This move makes sense if you look at PCI's board of advisors[1]- It's a bunch of bank VPs plus the head of security for both First Data and Pay Pal. The people who run PCI compliance are the ones that stand to lose if PCI compliance becomes moot, so they are doing all they can to make it seem like it's the be-all end-all of internet security and that you'd be a fool to trust an online merchant that wasn't PCI compliant. Interesting point about making vendor specific security tokens for internet transactions in an earlier comment. That would quite obviously help tremendously in the case of a breach, however that would put the onus on banks to be responsible for security instead of on merchants, and again the bank representatives on the BOA at PCI aren't going to go for that. [1] https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/organization_info/board-of-advisors.php https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/organization_info/board...
netcan 11y ago
This whole area is a big ole platform problem. Credit cards are a bad platform to build on. The duopoly structure is a bad platform for gradual improvement and the regulatory environment is a bad platform for innovation. We have deeply entrenched kick-it-forward allocation of responsibility and fixes to serious problems are characterized by firefighting, designed-by-committee compliance, cover-your-assness and such. All the hallmarks of a poorly functioning market, poorly functioning organization and general pathologies that occur whenever the way we organize is wrong. Leaving bitcoin aside,^ I think the fundamental problem is having CCs play the role they do. Instead of customers sending merchants money, merchants request money from CC companies. That is a bad system. ^The reason bitcoin is difficult to insert into the conversation is because it has so many big hairy goals. Government power over money. Macroeconomic theories of monetary policies baked in… Its a big interesting project, but the problem discussed here is only really a subset of what bitcoin is about so it's kind of a tangent.
JimmyL 11y ago
The biggest thing to remember when dealing with PCI DSS is that it's not the law. Your PCI obligations come out of a commercial agreement that you have with your processor, which comes out of commercial agreements they have with VISA/MC/et al. That's not to say that it's not a well-defined standard that you're going to end up having to follow in some way, but rather that statements like "Both Litle and Recurly flat out say that you need SAQ A-EP" have more wiggle-room than it would sound like, depending on the rest of the deal you're presenting them with. If you're a Level 3, I'd argue the goal should be to keep yourself on SAQ-A - the methods of which are pretty well-understood now. Pick a vendor which has a tokenization service designed to be hit from JS (they all work the same way at their core - download JS which contains an implementation of RSA and a public key, browser-side encrypt the CHD using that, send it off, get back a token). Put your payment form inside an iFrame which is served from a PCI-compliant host (like S3). Once tokenization is complete, send the token from inside the form back out to the containing page using postMessage or in the querystring. Do all that, and you're fine to stay on SAQ-A (https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding_SAQs_PCI_DSS_v3.pdf https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding...): Examples of e-commerce implementations addressed by SAQ A include...[merchant] website provides an inline frame (iFrame) to a PCI DSS compliant third-party processor facilitating the payment process...Examples of e-commerce implementations addressed by SAQ A-EP include...[merchant] website creates the payment form, and the payment data is delivered directly to the payment processor (often referred to as 'Direct Post') Will they change PCI DSS again to remove the iFrame rules? Maybe, but given the speed the PCI council moves at (and the warnings they give before changing things), I'd deal with it then. Lastly, if you're thinking of building a service which white-labels credit card processing and sells that processing as a service which your customers can then resell...don't forget about PCI PA-DSS
jusben1369 11y ago
This is a great article. I would add a couple of data points for context: - Visa won't come after you. Your merchant account provider is on the hook. They let you process cards so they need to ensure you're PCI compliant. That's how the flow works. - PCI 3.0 kicked in in January. People reassess annually. So if you reassessed last year under 2.0 standards you're still good until your renewal comes due. That's why this is slowly creeping across the payments space in terms of realization. - The card networks saw longer, sustained ongoing fraud happening in online commerce from .js or transparent redirects than they did from hosted payment pages. So the big change in PCI 2.0 to 3.0 was this idea of wanting to make it harder to completely build your own custom payment pages vs using a hosted payment page. HPP's are SAQ-A and customized payments pages - A EP - iFrame's and checkouts are really trying to be the best of both worlds. That's why they're currently treated as SAQ-A. There was definitely a lot of thrashing around how they would be treated when the 3.0 specs were being drafted and published. Again, I really enjoyed the article and appreciated Spreedly being included as a reference. I would agree with the major premise that in general merchants are unaware that the way they implemented their payments pages now mean they're in greater scope and that the providers aren't doing a good job educating them. It's an open secret in the industry that many payment gateways add a (pure margin) fine for $20 to $50 per month onto your account if you don't have valid certification. In a low margin business that reduces motivation to push small and medium merchants to ensure they're PCI compliant.
will_brown 11y ago
One of my side projects is a membership/subscription model Primary Care medical practice, and uses a third-party payment processor and we were recently audited by one of the large payment card issuers. There was a finding that the third-party processor - which we specifically choose because many of their clients were major gyms with similar monthly membership models - was improperly processing our members payments. If I recall correctly, there is one standard for one time payments and a different standard to be used for recurring payments. A subscription model like ours allows our subscribers to use either, but the third-party processor used the one-time payment standard to process both one-time payments and monthly recurring payments. Even though recurring payments was a major selling point of the processor, when it came down to it, they were not even aware of the distinction and aware of the separate standard. We were actually quiet fortunate in that we had original signature agreements for each and every instance of a member who agreed to the recurring automated payment, but as I recall without those agreements there may have been some kind of repercussion. Anyway it is a cautionary tale that just because you use a third-party, even a reputable one that serves national franchises, does not necessarily mean they know what they are doing.
mcdougle 11y ago
What service might I use if I needed to fulfill the following requirements: 1) Say I already have a customer -- he already paid a signup fee and we charge him monthly, so he's already put in his credit card information. At a later date, we need to charge him for something other than his monthly subscription fee. This is something he can do himself by logging in, but also something the site administrator needs to be able to do by selecting his account and clicking a button. In this case, we do not want the user to have to re-enter his credit card information; we want this part to be seamless. Is there a payment API that can do this -- random one-off charges against an existing account without the user having to sign into the third-party service himself? 2) Is there a service that charges bank accounts directly -- as in they enter their bank account number instead of a credit card number? Other than PayPal --they seem to be the only one that does this.
- benmanns 11y ago
  For 2), it looks like Balanced payments accepts ACH debits. https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-debits https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-debits
  - mcdougle 11y ago
    That's awesome! If I can do recurring payments with that, it might make things a hell of a lot easier! Thanks!
  - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
    Apparently not any more. Balanced shutting down (RIP) https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq
    - benmanns 11y ago
      Oh yikes, thanks. Listen to this guy.
    - mcdougle 11y ago
      I emailed them with a question and that's the response I got. Too bad, there seems to be a need out there for an automated bank account payment API.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

225 points by jaredtobin 11y ago

nice recap

Unless you're in the business of money, you shouldn't really be doing it yourself, so the important TLDR is: > Obviously it’s not fun living in that fear, which is why I believe that services like Stripe, that help you out with these issues, will thrive.

dangrossman 11y ago

I always recommend people build their payments on Spreedly (https://spreedly.com/ https://spreedly.com/). It checks off the boxes for minimizing PCI scope; you store no payment information, and collect none on your website either. You can either do a transparent redirect (your payment form points to a URL on their domain, which redirects back to your site with a token) or an iframe. Once you collect payment information, which they tokenize and store, you can run charges/auths/refunds against it using any of 81 different payment processors and gateways. Balanced one day, Stripe the next, and whatever startup is popular after them in a year -- without changing any of your payment code.

aethr 11y ago
Does anyone know if using transparent redirects actually waives your responsibilities for PCI compliance? Even though the credit card details aren't sent to your backend, they are still collected on a form hosted on your infrastructure. If your servers are compromised and malicious JS is added to your payment form, couldn't an attacker siphon credit card details via AJAX? It seems like the PCI documentation always uses terminology like "sites that collect credit card data", which I think sounds broad enough to include sites that use transparent redirects.
- mirashii 11y ago
  It's generally transparent redirects in the other direction. You load JS from their servers, the form posts to their servers, redirects back to yours. Often even the form isn't hosted on your infrastructure, but instead embedded into your page through some JS that is hosted elsewhere. If your responsibilities weren't waived or significantly lessened, I'd imagine companies like Stripe would be significantly less successful.
  - aethr 11y ago
    You generally don't need to load any JS from the payment processor to use a transparent redirect, although I'm sure some work this way. Transparent redirects just require setting the form action property on your payment page to a URL on the processor's site. The processor then silently redirects back to the next step in your process. Using an embedded payment form also shouldn't require any JS, as it is usually done using an iframe. This method should be safe, as the same-origin policy in the iframe would prevent JS on your domain from interacting with form elements in the iframe. But this is not typically what people are talking about when they talk about a transparent redirect.
- dangrossman 11y ago
  As of PCI-DSS v3 (January 2015), a transparent redirect qualifies you for SAQ A-EP, which is 100+ questions along with quarterly scans and annual pentesting. Basically, your website is "in scope" for securing. The iframe option still qualifies you for SAQ A, which is the short questionnaire without scanning/testing requirements.

chrisfosterelli 11y ago

This is a fantastic example of why companies like Stripe are going to come out ahead. Other companies are basically telling you "deal with it", while Stripe is giving you documentation and rewriting their software for it.

amelius 11y ago
Well, it is not so simple because if the payment is required to run on a separate page, then Stripe's api has to change, I suppose.

sjtgraham 11y ago

> The worst offenders however are the requirements that some businesses simply cannot comply with unless they have some serious cash laying around. Examples of this are >> Quarterly external vulnerability scans must be performed by an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV), approved by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). > and >> Is external penetration testing performed per the defined methodology, at least annually, and after any significant infrastructure or application changes to the environment (such as an operating system upgrade, a sub-network added to the environment, or an added web server)? Have you ever had a penetration test done? They basically run a load of OSS automated tools, generate a PDF report, and then charge you $1000s. It gives you no real insight and reveals nothing unless you've been a total noob. Why is this so expensive? Broadening of PCI scope + needlessly expensive compliance = Smells like a large opportunity.

metaverse 11y ago
We went through a SAQ D Service Provider 3.0, and paying for an ASV didn't hurt nearly as much as filling out that 80 page questionnaire... In fact, it reminded us apply some recent CVE's to our system before taking it to production. We used Comodo HackerGuardian which is $250/y, so you don't have to pay $1000s.
- akshatpradhan 11y ago
  I think my tool can actually help you. You document all your procedures in an organized structure using Github flavored markdown. http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/software-development-process-sdlc http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/softw... We're becoming the true Turbo Tax for compliance.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    You probably have a good tool, but I am not even going to take a look at it when it doesn't have its own url. herokuapp just screams weekend project.

gfosco 11y ago

Accepting payments is getting easier, because companies like Stripe will handle the burden of security and compliance.

ique 11y ago
Definitely easier "on the whole" compared to 10 years ago, but harder compared to last year.

tptacek 11y ago

Good. There's no love lost between me and companies that make significant money doing PCI assessments (they tend to be the bottom-feeding remora of the infosec economy), but the one criticism you could not level against the PCI certification program over the last 10 years is that it was too hard to get certified. Use Stripe. Move on.

shard972 11y ago
Well what about grattipay then? I think it's pretty obvious with their latest blog post that it's not just as easy as moving onto stripe and your done.
StavrosK 11y ago
What happens when the iframe allowance is removed, and not even using Stripe can save you from the credit card companies? This seems like a transparent plan to make PCI assessors more money.
- csirac2 11y ago
  Woah. Precisely the reason that card networks and issuers have been so lax previously is that they want consumers and issuers to use their damn cards. Being painful to use for merchants and consumers is incompatible with that. Until now losses were small enough... Now, PCI assessment industry is such a profoundly small thing next to the losses and risk carried by issuers - let alone the sheer core business volumes at stake here - forgive me for feeling skeptical that the reasons for this security bump are anything other than stakeholders wanting to stem losses and reduce risk.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Wouldn't that happen by just making rules that led to people using third-party services, though? Why is it a requirement that you change users' passwords every 90 days (something which I outright don't want to do), or get audited once a year (which is a considerable expense for no actual feedback, other than running an automated tool)?

joshwa 11y ago

I have to have a new pen test every time I "add a web server"?

akshatpradhan 11y ago
You have to pentest only 1) if the web server touches sensitive data and 2) if the sensitive web server being deployed is configured differently from all the other sensitive web servers in that same sensitive environment. If you're just adding web96 and its configured exactly like web01 through web95, then it doesn't need pen testing.

dperfect 11y ago

Stripe plans to use the iFrame "loophole" to enable Stripe.js customers to qualify under SAQ A-EP as mentioned on their website[1]: > The new version of Stripe.js meets these criteria by performing all transmission of sensitive cardholder data within an iframe served off of a stripe.com domain controlled by Stripe. Can someone help me understand how this is practically any more secure than the way Stripe.js currently works? It sounds like the intention of the iFrame exception[2] is to allow a payment form to be loaded, completed, and submitted to a compliant server all within a visible iFrame. From what I can tell, the "compliant" version of Stripe.js just submits the data (similar to the traditional way) via an invisible iFrame - the form is still hosted and completed on the (likely) non-compliant server. If that's the case, then I'd expect the "loophole" to go away soon and current Stripe.js users will have to adopt a payment flow similar to Stripe Checkout; in other words, it will be obvious that Stripe (a third party) is being used because the end user will be interacting with a form (or part of a form) completely hosted on Stripe's servers. For companies using Stripe to avoid PCI compliance with self-hosted payment forms, this essentially transforms Stripe into another PayPal checkout-style service. [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-about-pci-dss-3-0 https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-about-pci-dss-3-0 [2] https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding_SAQs_PCI_DSS_v3.pdf https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding...

sologoub 11y ago
PCI DSS and SAQs are in the end written by lawyers. There are many weird things there that don't really make that much sense. Unfortunately, in that space, you have to play by those rules...
matthewarkin 11y ago
I'm actually working on a blog post about this, basically the argument is whether or not you use Stripe.js and the invisible iframe and Stripe Checkout is that as soon as you have some malicious JS in your DOM all bets are off, and while stealing credit card info from Stripe Checkout may be harder than just doing $("#credit-card-number").value, its not /that/ much harder. (As part of my blog post, I actually use some malicious js on the merchant site to steal card info from a Braintree iframe (the drop in))

Animats 11y ago

This is good. People are getting fed up with replacing their credit card every six months because some online retailer had a breach. You can outsource payment processing to Stripe, Paypal, Square, Yahoo Store, etc. There's no reason every web merchant should see credit card numbers. Stripe is in Visa's doghouse right now.[1] Their entry on the Visa Global Registry of Service Providers has turned yellow, with an expiration date of Mar 31, 2015. This means they're having some PCI compliance problem.[2] Visa gradually cranks up penalties until the problem is fixed, or, after about 9 months, just pulls the plug. Visa says Square and PayPal are OK right now. Yahoo is also in the yellow doghouse. (If you're a Stripe or a Yahoo Store merchant, they were supposed to inform you that Visa put them in the doghouse, so you can change vendors. Did they?) [1] http://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do http://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do [2] http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/Bulletin-PCIENFORCE-102214.pdf http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/Bulletin-PCIENFORCE-1...

ique 11y ago
> There's no reason every web merchant should see credit card numbers. The heightened requirements are actually for when you are using services that _don't_ let the merchant see the CC number. Like the "old" Stripe.js.
- eps 11y ago
  Do elaborate ... And what is old/new stripe.js ?
  - andreyf 11y ago
    > they are changing Stripe.js to now serve up the data in an iFrame so you can keep using their product more or less like before but without heightened requirements I imagine they're changing things to be like Google Wallet, where you use a pop-out window to type your credit card number into (just the first time, it's save on their side after). That way you know you're giving your CC just to google.com by looking at the URL of the new window. Stripe's current JS-based version has better UX, but it's a little scary if the merchant whose site you're entering your card into has no legal security requirements. On the other hand, it's a purely theoretical problem afaik - I haven't heard of any breaches resulting from merchants which use JS third party payment solutions having their websites hacked to serve up bad JS.

akshatpradhan 11y ago

This is great that HN is talking about PCI. The problem with PCI and compliance in general is three fold. 1. People don't want compliance [1] 2. People think compliance is broadly applied 3. People don't know where to start I'll answer these point by point. 1) The reason people don't want compliance is because the security industry claims that Compliance is bare minimum and not enough. If they told you that Compliance was simply doing your due diligence on your sensitive devices, I think the market would have had a software tool to easily get us through the process by now. (I built a "brilliant" PCI tool btw. Link below) So let me explain to them why I think Compliance is just doing your due diligence and we'll do that by simply asking this question: If compliance is bare minimum and not enough, what is a comprehensive approach available right now to reasonably protect our sensitive data? The security professionals will tell you Risk Assessments and Pentesting often is the best alternative [2] Their answer is to specifically switch to Risk Assessment and PenTesting often, which is Requirement 11 and Requirement 12 of PCI. Each one of the bullets written is specifically covered by PCI DSS 3.1, including social engineering/phishing attacks that are provided through security awareness training. They're telling me that compliance is bare minimum, yet their suggestion is to do a subset of compliance. Its circular logic. Since its circular logic and nobody has been able to provide me with a reasonable approachable alternative to going above bare minimum, I hypothesize that compliance is NOT bare minimum, but in fact, due diligence. Think of a fort. Forts had defined compliance checklists in the old times. In a fort, you go through a security rotation of making sure the pot of boiling oil tips over on time. You practice your smoke signaling so that the appropriate people are notified in the event of a wall breach. Were they spending a majority of their security drills taking half their army, launching it against the fort, fixing what fails, and then doing a risk assessment? 2) A compliance program by definition is only applicable to your sensitive environment. It cannot be applied broadly. Its forcing you to go through the decision making process of asking yourself, "What's most important to protect right now". Only you can classify the sensitivity of your devices. Only you can choose if your code base is sensitive or your employee's SSN is sensitive. But whatever you’ve classified as sensitive must fall under compliance. Let's refresh: Compliance is designed to be applied only to your sensitive data. If you choose to put a non-sensitive devices under a compliance program, then you've specifically applied compliance broadly. 3) To approach any compliance program, ask yourself 6 questions on any specific device. 1. Does this device store, process or transmit sensitive data (e.g. cardholder/health/SSN)? 2. Is there unrestricted access between this device and a sensitive device? 3. Does this device provide authorization, authentication, or access control to a sensitive device? 4. Can this device initiate a connection to a sensitive device? 5. Can a sensitive device initiate a connection to this device? 6. Can this device administer a sensitive device? If you're able to answer yes to any of those questions then your device is sensitive and due diligence is required. Let's go back to the fort example. Is there unrestricted access from that boiling pot to the sensitive gold chamber? Does the pot provide access control to the sensitive gold chamber? If yes, then configuration settings of the pot, pulley, oil, need to be recorded and monitored periodically. If no, then its possible that you might have a business justification for not putting as much rigor into recording and monitoring the correct functionality of that pot. You've already started the compliance process by asking yourself, "Does my laptop initiate an outbound connection to a sensitive device?" If yes, then your laptop falls under compliance and due diligence is required. Everything else is just record keeping. Create a network diagram of only your sensitive assets. Write down how you rotate your keys on those sensitive assets. Write down what log files you periodically review. Go through a practice run of your Incident Response in case there is a breach of your sensitive asset. This is a pretty long post and I hope it helped. Shameless plug, I'm building a tool called ComplianceChimp to guide you through this entire process including recording your procedures with Github flavored Markdown. You can see how I'm using our tool to get us through the PCI Compliance process. [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510435 [2] https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129 https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129 [3] http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/software-development-process-sdlc http://cc-stg2.herokuapp.com/compliancechimp/documents/softw...

borski 11y ago

For what it's worth, PCI compliance as it stands today is complete BS. It provides a false sense of security and most of the PCI ASVs are the scourge of infosec. I can't tell you how many customers we have that use the cheapest possible PCI ASV for "compliance," but then use us in addition for "real security," despite the fact that we aren't an ASV. We've intentionally stayed away from becoming one thus far, actually, because that is a whole political game in itself. [1] The new requirements are better. Stringent and hard to comply with, but better. The real solution, as I see it, is to build automated security testing into your SDLC / Dev process. Penetration tests, when done by a good firm like Matasano, are incredibly useful, but lose their value the next time you push code. Building tools like Tinfoil into your CI process makes sure you don't get owned between pen tests. PCI is unfortunately written by political minds and lawyers, not engineers or infosec folk. This is an unpopular comment, but is true in my estimation. Comply because you must, but please don't treat it as the end-all be-all. Care about your customers' data just a little bit more. [1] http://bretthard.in/2013/01/the-pci-asv-process-sucks/ http://bretthard.in/2013/01/the-pci-asv-process-sucks/

akshatpradhan 11y ago
TinFoil, I remember I invited you to speak at the Boston Security Meetup several years ago! >The real solution, as I see it, is to build automated security testing into your SDLC / Dev process. Penetration tests, when done by a good firm like Matasano, are incredibly useful, but lose their value the next time you push code. Building tools like Tinfoil into your CI process makes sure you don't get owned between pen tests. This is false because you're suggesting that security testing of your SDLC, a subset of the compliance program is a more diligent solution than the entire compliance program. I explain myself in a comment below and I'd be glad to debate with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510369
- borski 11y ago
  Ha, good to see you here. I'm not suggesting that there is absolutely no value to any of PCI. The fact that it forces you to think about security at all is already of some value. However, I am saying that passing a PCI audit is incredibly easy as compared to thorough automated testing, and especially compared to a (good) manual penetration test. Because you can pass a PCI audit relatively easily, people will do that and think it's enough, when in reality there is far more they should be doing to protect their customers. Should you not do PCI? No, of course you should, as it's required by the processors. Is PCI going to protect you from getting breached? No, it's not enough, and you shouldn't pretend it is. If you have to pick exactly /one/ thing to do in addition to (or instead of) PCI, building thorough automated security testing into your SDLC process is it.

Silhouette 11y ago

As a small business taking card payments, we're far more concerned about the absurd rate of failure of perfectly legitimate charges than anything PCI-DSS say. We lose more customers to Stripe charges failing than any other reason, by a considerable margin, and it seems even Stripe don't actually know why because it's organisations further down the line making these decisions. The whole card payments industry is broken, and the sooner the growing direct payments industry kills off the credit card giants, the better.

mrweasel 11y ago

It's only getting harder if you have "inline" payment. Honestly I'm glad to see that go away. We always used "hosted payment page" solution, it's safer, and we've been expecting tougher rules for some time. If you want to talk about online payment becoming harder, you should address the increasing number of payment options that online stores need to support. Adding to debit and credit cards are bank transfers (which is different in every country), PayPal, invoicing, part-payments, financing, and an almost unlimited number of local option.

deleted 11y ago
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cm2187 11y ago

We should have moved a long time ago to vendor specific credit card numbers (ecommerce isn't exactly a new activity). Say I get from my bank a token which I provide to this vendor, and the first time the vendor uses it to accept a payment, the token locks in to that vendor, i.e. my bank will not allow any payment with this token to another vendor (i.e. to another bank account). Then it doesn't matter if it's stolen, only that vendor can use it anyway. And I could have the option to tell my bank to make it a single use token, or to cancel a multiple use token or to set a payment cap to that token. That doesn't seem very complex to implement and would alleviate the vast majority of the credit card related problems. I am sure it can be made simpler, have a protocol with redirects to the bank's website that eliminate the need for the client to copy-paste a token, or to have another mechanism with similar effects. Banks are one of these many industries that don't seem to get technology. They employ massive IT and developer staff but are run by people who don't get it (and to make things worse, are most of the time massive bureaucracies which means that even when they know what they need to do they just can't execute).

nmridul 11y ago
This is similar to how bank payment is working in India. When I make payment on seller website, it redirects me to the bank website. I enter my credentials (including phone based or device based OTP) to confirm the payment and its done. And there is also option to make easy subscriptions.
- sumedh 11y ago
  Subscription based payments dont work in India though, which sucks.
fragmede 11y ago
Bank of America has ShopSafe which allows you to generate a temporary credit card number to use with the sketchy online merchant that has the particular gadget I want to buy. Their implementation leaves much to be desired, but it's a step in the right direction.
- 11y ago

ukigumo 11y ago

Well, I guess it won't hurt if I offer my services for PCI guidance for startups here :-) One thing to keep in mind is that PCI is a bare-minimum of security "best practices" that aims at validating that a company transacting with payment cards has an understanding of data classification and protection.

akshatpradhan 11y ago
If compliance is bare minimum and not enough, what is a comprehensive approach available right now to reasonably protect our sensitive data? The security professionals will tell you Risk Assessments and Pentesting often is the best alternative [1] Their answer is to specifically switch to Risk Assessment and PenTesting often, which is Requirement 11 and Requirement 12 of PCI. Each one of the bullets written is specifically covered by PCI DSS 3.1, including social engineering/phishing attacks that are provided through security awareness training. They're telling me that compliance is bare minimum, yet their suggestion is to do a subset of compliance. Its circular logic. Since its circular logic and nobody has been able to provide me with a reasonable approachable alternative to going above bare minimum, I claim that compliance is NOT bare minimum, but in fact, due diligence. Think of a fort. Forts had defined compliance checklists in the old times. In a fort, you go through a security rotation of making sure the pot of boiling oil tips over on time. You practice your smoke signaling so that the appropriate people are notified in the event of a wall breach. Were they spending a majority of their security drills taking half their army, launching it against the fort, fixing what fails, and then doing a risk assessment? [1] https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129 https://gist.github.com/akshatpradhan/1573e5f6c1872b6af129
- ukigumo 11y ago
  The most comprehensive approach is to have an InfoSec policy portfolio which permeates into every corner of your organisation and dictates secure operating behaviours and mandates logical and physical security practices. This will include regular vulnerability scans on your code, your application stack and your infrastructure but it will also include instructions on how to classify data and how to handle data according to that classification. Compliance is a achieved by marking a checklist which is why is fairly easy to botch it up. Sure you can do a subset of the checklist and have compensating controls for everything you've missed but the risk of non-compliance is not being able to do business (at best) and jail time (at worst) so you tell me what is your motivation to fail to meet the bare minimums of security best practices in card payment industry, aka, PCI-DSS. Think of a castle; It will have several walls, towers, heavy doors, guards etc. It will also be placed in a hill, a mount or otherwise hard to access area (never in a vale for instance). It will also have the largest possible distance between the treasure hall and the front door. The threats your castle faces will continuously evolve, and the walls that stood up against bows and arrows are useless against turrets or cannons, so if you want to keep your treasure you do your best to be one step ahead and you don't get that by making sure your original walls are still in place or any other base requirements are still met.

jpatokal 11y ago

Every time legacy payment processors ratchet up compliance requirements, cryptocurrencies get another little boost. And while it's easy to forget in the US, where credit cards are handed out in boxes of cereal, getting a credit card is an insuperable hurdle of much of the world's population, eg. the estimated 75% of Indians who work in the informal economy and thus can't prove (or don't have) regular income.

jasonisalive 11y ago

The problem of credit cards is that when you make a payment, you have to give away your private key. No amount of securitisation will take away this fundamental flaw. This is one of Bitcoin's evolutionary advantages in this space. To send money with Bitcoin, there is no need to expose one's private key. A massive corporation could take millions of annual payments and their paying customers needn't be concerned about their money being at risk. If the entity has poor security, the only people they endanger are themselves.

deleted 11y ago
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sageabilly 11y ago

This move makes sense if you look at PCI's board of advisors[1]- It's a bunch of bank VPs plus the head of security for both First Data and Pay Pal. The people who run PCI compliance are the ones that stand to lose if PCI compliance becomes moot, so they are doing all they can to make it seem like it's the be-all end-all of internet security and that you'd be a fool to trust an online merchant that wasn't PCI compliant. Interesting point about making vendor specific security tokens for internet transactions in an earlier comment. That would quite obviously help tremendously in the case of a breach, however that would put the onus on banks to be responsible for security instead of on merchants, and again the bank representatives on the BOA at PCI aren't going to go for that. [1] https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/organization_info/board-of-advisors.php https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/organization_info/board...

netcan 11y ago

This whole area is a big ole platform problem. Credit cards are a bad platform to build on. The duopoly structure is a bad platform for gradual improvement and the regulatory environment is a bad platform for innovation. We have deeply entrenched kick-it-forward allocation of responsibility and fixes to serious problems are characterized by firefighting, designed-by-committee compliance, cover-your-assness and such. All the hallmarks of a poorly functioning market, poorly functioning organization and general pathologies that occur whenever the way we organize is wrong. Leaving bitcoin aside,^ I think the fundamental problem is having CCs play the role they do. Instead of customers sending merchants money, merchants request money from CC companies. That is a bad system. ^The reason bitcoin is difficult to insert into the conversation is because it has so many big hairy goals. Government power over money. Macroeconomic theories of monetary policies baked in… Its a big interesting project, but the problem discussed here is only really a subset of what bitcoin is about so it's kind of a tangent.

JimmyL 11y ago

The biggest thing to remember when dealing with PCI DSS is that it's not the law. Your PCI obligations come out of a commercial agreement that you have with your processor, which comes out of commercial agreements they have with VISA/MC/et al. That's not to say that it's not a well-defined standard that you're going to end up having to follow in some way, but rather that statements like "Both Litle and Recurly flat out say that you need SAQ A-EP" have more wiggle-room than it would sound like, depending on the rest of the deal you're presenting them with. If you're a Level 3, I'd argue the goal should be to keep yourself on SAQ-A - the methods of which are pretty well-understood now. Pick a vendor which has a tokenization service designed to be hit from JS (they all work the same way at their core - download JS which contains an implementation of RSA and a public key, browser-side encrypt the CHD using that, send it off, get back a token). Put your payment form inside an iFrame which is served from a PCI-compliant host (like S3). Once tokenization is complete, send the token from inside the form back out to the containing page using postMessage or in the querystring. Do all that, and you're fine to stay on SAQ-A (https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding_SAQs_PCI_DSS_v3.pdf https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Understanding...): Examples of e-commerce implementations addressed by SAQ A include...[merchant] website provides an inline frame (iFrame) to a PCI DSS compliant third-party processor facilitating the payment process...Examples of e-commerce implementations addressed by SAQ A-EP include...[merchant] website creates the payment form, and the payment data is delivered directly to the payment processor (often referred to as 'Direct Post') Will they change PCI DSS again to remove the iFrame rules? Maybe, but given the speed the PCI council moves at (and the warnings they give before changing things), I'd deal with it then. Lastly, if you're thinking of building a service which white-labels credit card processing and sells that processing as a service which your customers can then resell...don't forget about PCI PA-DSS

jusben1369 11y ago

This is a great article. I would add a couple of data points for context: - Visa won't come after you. Your merchant account provider is on the hook. They let you process cards so they need to ensure you're PCI compliant. That's how the flow works. - PCI 3.0 kicked in in January. People reassess annually. So if you reassessed last year under 2.0 standards you're still good until your renewal comes due. That's why this is slowly creeping across the payments space in terms of realization. - The card networks saw longer, sustained ongoing fraud happening in online commerce from .js or transparent redirects than they did from hosted payment pages. So the big change in PCI 2.0 to 3.0 was this idea of wanting to make it harder to completely build your own custom payment pages vs using a hosted payment page. HPP's are SAQ-A and customized payments pages - A EP - iFrame's and checkouts are really trying to be the best of both worlds. That's why they're currently treated as SAQ-A. There was definitely a lot of thrashing around how they would be treated when the 3.0 specs were being drafted and published. Again, I really enjoyed the article and appreciated Spreedly being included as a reference. I would agree with the major premise that in general merchants are unaware that the way they implemented their payments pages now mean they're in greater scope and that the providers aren't doing a good job educating them. It's an open secret in the industry that many payment gateways add a (pure margin) fine for $20 to $50 per month onto your account if you don't have valid certification. In a low margin business that reduces motivation to push small and medium merchants to ensure they're PCI compliant.

will_brown 11y ago

One of my side projects is a membership/subscription model Primary Care medical practice, and uses a third-party payment processor and we were recently audited by one of the large payment card issuers. There was a finding that the third-party processor - which we specifically choose because many of their clients were major gyms with similar monthly membership models - was improperly processing our members payments. If I recall correctly, there is one standard for one time payments and a different standard to be used for recurring payments. A subscription model like ours allows our subscribers to use either, but the third-party processor used the one-time payment standard to process both one-time payments and monthly recurring payments. Even though recurring payments was a major selling point of the processor, when it came down to it, they were not even aware of the distinction and aware of the separate standard. We were actually quiet fortunate in that we had original signature agreements for each and every instance of a member who agreed to the recurring automated payment, but as I recall without those agreements there may have been some kind of repercussion. Anyway it is a cautionary tale that just because you use a third-party, even a reputable one that serves national franchises, does not necessarily mean they know what they are doing.

mcdougle 11y ago

What service might I use if I needed to fulfill the following requirements: 1) Say I already have a customer -- he already paid a signup fee and we charge him monthly, so he's already put in his credit card information. At a later date, we need to charge him for something other than his monthly subscription fee. This is something he can do himself by logging in, but also something the site administrator needs to be able to do by selecting his account and clicking a button. In this case, we do not want the user to have to re-enter his credit card information; we want this part to be seamless. Is there a payment API that can do this -- random one-off charges against an existing account without the user having to sign into the third-party service himself? 2) Is there a service that charges bank accounts directly -- as in they enter their bank account number instead of a credit card number? Other than PayPal --they seem to be the only one that does this.

benmanns 11y ago
For 2), it looks like Balanced payments accepts ACH debits. https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-debits https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-debits
- mcdougle 11y ago
  That's awesome! If I can do recurring payments with that, it might make things a hell of a lot easier! Thanks!
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  Apparently not any more. Balanced shutting down (RIP) https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq https://www.balancedpayments.com/stripe/faq
  - benmanns 11y ago
    Oh yikes, thanks. Listen to this guy.
  - mcdougle 11y ago
    I emailed them with a question and that's the response I got. Too bad, there seems to be a need out there for an automated bank account payment API.

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