Apple Pay Security

One of the most exciting and prominent features of the brand new lineup of Apple products is Apple Pay. By taking a photo of one's credit or debit cards using the phone's built in camera, an iPhone 6 owner can store their card's information in Passbook. Once a card is stored in Passbook, the iPhone 6 can be used to make purchases rather than using the actual card. Instead of using your credit card at checkouts, you can use your phone! 

"But surely," you might be thinking, "this can't be safe!" However, Apple Pay is more secure than one might suspect at first glance. Instead of storing your credit card's information, the iPhone 6 generates a unique token for your card and stores this token in a chip, called the Secure Element, located within the phone.

Thanks to this process of tokenization, it becomes very difficult for bad guys to extract your credit card information. If a hacker manages to extract the information from an iPhone 6, he will not find any credit card information - just the token. Likewise, when an iPhone 6 owner uses Apple Pay to make a purchase, the token is given to the merchant rather than credit card information. When huge breaches in security occur, such as the recent Target and Home Depot hacks, Apple Pay users will be safe because the merchants never put their card information on record to be stolen.

As a final layer of security, Apple promises that it does not keep records of your transaction history using Apple Pay. This means that even if Apple itself were to be hacked, the hackers would not be able to find any sensitive information related to you. Sweet!

With all of this in mind, it sounds like Apple Pay's security is great!  However, it is probably not the cure-all solution to secure payments that we want it to be. Rest assured, clever hackers will be hard at work to find loopholes and security exploits. Even if our credit card information is safe, a hacker may find a way to use our Apple Pay tokens to their advantage.

One thing that you should definitely be wary of now is handing your cards to waiters in restaurants. If your waiter has an iPhone 6, it may only take a moment to take a picture of your card to be used for fraudulent Apple Pay transactions. What's worse is that, thanks to Apple's decision to not store transaction information, a hacker using your card for Apple Pay may be virtually untraceable until it is too late. Spooky!

 

The most secure form of payment known to man.

Apple Pay definitely sounds like it is a large step forward for transaction security. But as always, it would be wise to exercise caution and be wary of potential exploits. Stay safe!