Tokens stolen during a breach are completely useless to hackers, as they cannot be returned to the original PAN.No version of the PAN is stored or transmitted by the merchant, only the token that represents it.The PAN is never accepted by the merchant in an unprotected state.Utilizing PCI tokeniz ation to protect your payments stream has four distinct advantages over using only encryption: From there, it is stored and swapped with a mathematically unrelated token the token is sent back to the merchant to use for additional processing and storage, and the real PAN is sent on by the token provider to the payment processor to complete the transaction. With tokenization as a PCI compliance solution integrated into the payment stream, card data usually a credit card primary account number (PAN) is immediately sent to a secure cloud platform for tokenization. Tokenization makes PCI compliance easier and more affordable.ĭue to its risk-reducing capabilities, tokenization is frequently deployed to protect cardholder information and other PCI data. In effect, the risk of data theft is virtually eliminated. Because no sensitive data is being stored, none is available to be stolen. So, in the event that a tokenized environment is breached, no sensitive data or compromising keys/credentials would be revealed only the non-sensitive tokens. These placeholders can be stored within an organization’s internal systems for business use while sensitive values are safely stored outside of its environment. Instead, it removes the data from an organization’s internal systems entirely and exchanges it for a randomly generated nonsensitive placeholder (a token). Unlike encryption, tokenization does not use keys to alter the original data. encryption is that tokenized data cannot be returned to its original form. The primary differences and benefits of using tokenization vs. Encrypting data may make it temporarily secure while in transit, but once at rest in business systems, it is vulnerable to theft and decryption. That’s the primary weakness of encryption if a key is exposed in a breach, the encrypted data can be returned to its original, sensitive form. When a merchant’s IT systems are breached by hackers, the database of customer PANs can be stolen and sold for fraudulent use, even if it is encrypted. So although encryption increases the difficulty of finding the real information hidden within the encrypted data, it does not make it impossible to be revealed. However, all encryption is eventually breakable it’s simply a matter of how strong your algorithm is and how powerful the computers are of those people trying to break it. The strength of the encryption is based on the algorithm it uses to secure the data a more complex algorithm will create stronger encryption that is more difficult to crack. Often the merchant stores the card data to make it easy for customers to make another purchase or to make recurring payments. Once the PAN reaches an online store’s web server, it’s decrypted and used by the retail software to charge the customer’s account, setting off a series of actions by the merchant, payment processor, and card issuers. This level of security is now ubiquitous for financial web transactions and helps to ensure that no middleman can read the encrypted PAN and other information. That little lock icon on a browser’s URL line indicates that data, such as a payment account number (PAN), is encrypted as it flows between the browser and the online store. with a mathematically derived stand-in that, ideally, can only be read by an authorized entity in possession of the same encryption keys that were used to create the value. Encryption alone is not a secure solution.Įncryption replaces a sensitive value such as personal data, cardholder data (CHD), personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), etc. When compared side by side, tokenization is the superior security technology. Although they both have a place in protecting data stored in the enterprise and when in transit, there are clear differences in the degree of security they provide, as well as the flexibility of their implementations. Both tokenization and encryption technologies have long been integral tools for securing sensitive data.
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