Although cryptography plays an essential part in most modern solutions,
especially in payments, cryptographic algorithms remain a black box for
most users of these tools. Just as a sane backend developer does not
drill down into low-level disk access details of a server filesystem,
payments professionals have enough things to worry about before they
ever need to bother themselves with debugging an encrypted value or a
message digest. However, at a certain point, an engineer faces the need
to identify a problem with a particular algorithm or, perhaps, to create
a testing tool that would simulate a counterpart in a protocol that
involves encryption.
The world of cryptography has moved on with giant leaps. Available
technical standards mention acronyms and link to more standards, some of
which are very large while others are not available for free. After
finding the standards for the algorithm, the specific mode of operation
must also be identified. Most implementations use several cryptographic
primitives--for example, key derivation with a block cipher, which
produces a secret that is used together with a hash function and a
double padding scheme to produce a digital signature of a base64-encoded
value. Understanding this requires more sifting through online sources,
more reading of platform and library documents, and finally, when some
code can be written, there are very few test cases to validate it.
Cryptography for Payment Professionals is intended for technical
people, preferably with some background in software engineering, who may
need to deal with a cryptographic algorithm in the payments realm. It
does not cover the payment technology in-depth, nor does it provide more
than a brief overview of some regulations and security standards.
Instead, it focuses on the cryptographic aspects of each field it
mentions. Highlights include:
- Major cryptographic algorithms and the principles of their operation
- Cryptographic aspects of card-present (e.g., magnetic stripe, EMV) and
online (e.g., e-Commerce and 3DS 2.0) transactions
- A detailed description of TDES DUKPT and AES DUKPT protocols, as well
as an example implementation and test cases for both
It is best if the reader understands programming, number and string
representations in machine memory, and bit operations. Knowledge of C,
Python, or Java may make the examples easier to read but this is not
mandatory.
Code related to the book is available at the author's GitHub site:
https: //github.com/ilya-dubinsky/cfpp
