Visa and Intel today announced a collaboration agreement to help bring world-class payment and data security technologies to the growing world of connected devices—from personal computers and mobile devices, to intelligent appliances and wearable technologies.
With the spectrum of commerce growing in size and complexity, so does the need for sophisticated privacy and security controls that deliver on simplicity, interoperability and convenience. Intel and Visa both play fundamental roles in shaping this new commerce landscape and as part of this agreement, will work together to integrate data security solutions into Intel chipsets to help device manufacturers build more secure payment functionality into their products.
Visa and Intel have two significant collaborations in development:
- More Secure Internet of Things: Intel and Visa are working together to integrate Visa’s encryption technology with Intel Data Protection Technology for Transactions as an option for merchants to provide more secure data transmission. Through the collaboration, payment data originating from an encryption-enabled device can be transmitted in a format that is unusable if intercepted by hackers. Intel Data Protection Technology for Transactions will support use cases in which card data is accepted through non-traditional payment channels, such as computers, mobile and IoT devices. Together, Visa and Intel plan to implement uses of the Intel chip as a hardware root of trust and to build upon that with Visa and Intel software.
- Improved Online and Device Authentication: Establishing if a cardholder is shopping from a recognized payment device can help merchants and issuers distinguish between good and bad transactions. The collaboration announced today aims to make device identification easier and more predictive. By providing hardware-level data—in the form of a secure device code—during the 3-D Secure authentication process, issuers can have even greater confidence to approve low-risk transactions, or to require additional verification for suspicious ones. Called Intel Online Connect, the solution will be included in 7th Gen Intel Core systems and will work with the existing 3-D Secure protocol and the upcoming 2.0 version, which EMVCo is expected to release this year.
“The rise of connected devices will rapidly expand the platforms we use to shop and pay. It will also open up new entry points for hackers,” said Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk and authentication products at Visa. “Tackling this security challenge requires a new level of coordination between players in payments, technology and computing. Working with Intel, we’re ensuring that the next generation of payment devices have security hardwired at the ground level.”
“7th Gen Intel Core processors will make the online shopping experience hassle-free and provide security that’s built-in to the hardware,” said Rick Echevarria, vice president of Software and Services Group; GM Platforms Security Division at Intel. “Through this collaboration with Visa, Intel continues to innovate in platform security technologies, such as Intel Software Guard Extensions and Intel Online Connect to further protect one of the most preferred online shopping experience on the PC.”
Intel will showcase Intel Online Connect at Money20/20 in a Secure Guest Checkout experience, which extends the familiar online payment scenario in which a user makes a purchase at a new merchant site—one where the customer does not already have an account and chooses to manually enter card details as part of the checkout process.