PCI And EMV Cards: The Urban Myth That Won’t Die
Written by Walter ConwayMay 3rd, 2011
The recent comments by leading retailers that want U.S. card issuers to move to the EMV standard for card authentication are missing the point. EMV cannot, does not and will not make PCI go away, regardless of recent moves by Visa Europe, pens PCI Columnist Walt Conway.
PCI is impervious to silver bullets of any kind. There are a few things every retailer needs to understand about both EMV and PCI before jumping on this particular bandwagon. Conway crafts a little thought experiment that assumes, as was suggested, that EMV becomes the "metric system" equivalent for payment cards. That means Chip-and-PIN—like a shift to the metric system—replaces all previous card and cardholder authentication methods. My EMV metric system card has no signature panel, no magnetic stripe. And the PAN is printed, not embossed, on the front of the card. Does PCI go away? Conway suggests it does not.
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4 Comments | Read PCI And EMV Cards: The Urban Myth That Won’t Die
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May 4th, 2011 at 8:23 am
I can not read the whole story, as I’m not a premium subscriber. However, in my humble opinion, PCI is not an issue for certain merchants that implement EMV. Why? In at least a common implementation in my own country, the merchant will simply not have any access to CHD. The PAN goes encrypted from the terminal to the PSP, and the merchant does not have access to the decryption keys.
There is no integration between the terminal and the POS system that exposes any CHD.
May 4th, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Thanks for the comment, Erik, and you actually hit on a key point I was trying to make.
That is, EMV can help with POS-only systems so long as everything goes right. But it’s the other situations like card-not-present (MOTO), ecommerce (can’t read the chip using my keyboard, at least), or when the chip or reader or clerk fails, or any of a million other things happen, we bring all those systems, people, and processes into PCI scope.
Let’s also remember all the merchant back office and post processing systems that use the PAN as a user ID. Bad practice to be sure, but the unfortunate reality all too often, and EMV won’t re-write those legacy applications anytime soon.
I wish there were a silver bullet for PCI. Really, I do. It just doesn’t exist in the real world.
May 5th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
I would say that you don’t need PCI anymore once all transactions are chip based. And in Europe we will reach this stage pretty soon. Even on the Internet I now need my chip to generate a token, in case the merchant website implements MasterCard SecureCode.
May 12th, 2011 at 9:49 am
EMV does not encrypt all sensitive card data. Just the authentication data. “Track equivalent data” is still handled by the point of sale system in clear text. There’s a few digits changed so if magstripe cards are made with it, the issuer will know it’s a fraud. But the account number and expiration date are still in plain text. Mike Dahn has a good info here: http://chaordicmind.com/blog/2010/05/29/the-real-deal-on-chip-and-pin-emv-in-the-us/