Gemalto helps banks and payment providers simplify and streamline encryption operations

Gemalto announced the launch of the industry's first payment hardware security module (HSM) to include partitioning as an advanced security feature. This new capability allows financial services organizations to simplify cryptographic operations by using a single HSM to support dozens of security applications and protect sensitive payment information and transactions.

Bank and financial services firms are using encryption to protect a growing number of digital services and new transaction types such as cloud-based and peer-to-peer payments. Typically, these organizations have deployed an individual HSM to secure each individual payment operation or transaction application.

While necessary to meet stringent security requirements, adding more HSMs can increase the complexity of cryptographic infrastructure and operations. The new partitioning capability of Gemalto's SafeNet Luna EFT Payment HSM solves this challenge with a single HSM platform that can be separated into multiple virtual HSMs to provide the scalability financial services firms require today.

Each partition functions as an independent HSM meaning financial institutions can encrypt more data and protect a wider range of financial transactions without having to deploy multiple HSMs. Partitioning offers financial organizations a tremendous amount of flexibility to move keys in and out of the cloud environment, maintain control and ownership of their encryption keys and run more cloud-based payment applications under one HSM.

"While the cloud brings endless opportunities for faster convenient banking and payments, the challenge remains around security," said Rob Westervelt, Analyst at IDC. "It's especially important with the rise of mobile payments and cloud-enablement technology like host-card emulation (HCE) to implement a strong data security strategy with end-to-end encryption. Hardware Security Modules underlying security brings trust to these new types of transactions and payments."

"Gemalto has a long history of enabling and securing payments from credit cards to mobile devices and our SafeNet HSM has a proven track record of protecting over $1 trillion transactions worldwide every day," said Todd Moore, Senior Vice President for Encryption Products at Gemalto. "By adding partitioning to the SafeNet Payment HSM, we are enabling our customers to reduce hardware, improve cloud usability, and decrease transaction processing times all while maintaining the same level of security required by the financial industry."

With Gemalto's SafeNet Luna EFT Payment HSM, one of the most scalable encryption solutions on the market, Gemalto's SafeNet Luna EFT Payment HSM helps banks:

• Reduce PCI-DSS compliance scope by using end-to-end encryption of payment data, stored online, captured at the point-of-sale, or traveling to and from the financial institution's backend
• Manage large volumes of cryptographic security functions simultaneously to secure the growing number of online, peer-to-peer and mobile payment transactions
• Take advantage of Host Card Emulation (HCE) based contactless payments by securing the enrollment, provisioning, and tokenization process of payment card credentials and operations
• Access and integrate with a wider range of point of sale (POS) terminals through Gemalto's extensive partner network
• Scale transactional processing for faster authorization speeds in the cloud and credit, debit, e-wallet and chip cards while meeting FIPS 140​​-2 Level 3and PCI-HSM 2.0 standard​