Are you worried about identity theft from typing your credit card numbers into your browser when you’re shopping online? The SmartSwipe is a USB credit card swipe machine that removes that worry by encrypting those numbers before they even get to your computer. Swipe your card through it just like you do at the store and it will do all the work for you using something called Dynamic SSL. Right now it only works with Windows PCs and credit cards (not debit cards).
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OK, is it just me, or does anyone else think calling these things ‘swipers’ in the age of Identity Theft is a really bad idea?
There is no way this could possibly be any more secure than simply typing in the number. No matter what encryption they use, security they employ, or hardware they build…at the end of the day, the website is expecting data in a specific format, and only that format. You can encrypt it all you want, but it’s going to have to be decrypted before it can be sent to the website itself, and I would bet dollars to donuts that all it really is in the eyes of the computer is a keyboard, which essentially guarantees that any keyloggers will pickup its input.
Rob-
How do you know the encryption isn’t done in the device? It’s possible that after you swipe your card, the number is encrypted (via dynamic SSL) then sent through your connection to the web page, where it is decrypted. Also, it is a USB device, so your computer should not see this as a keyboard. Even if a hacker were capturing your entire USB data stream, all they would get is encrypted data.
However, this device will do nothing for you once an online vendor stores your credit card info on their own servers. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard about databases with huge amounts of data being stolen from corporate servers….
erm…. if you can only use a credit card wouldn’t that increase debt
Dynamic SSL encrypts the information on the device, then seemlessly merges it with the regular SSL stream. While SmartSwipe cannot protect credit card information once it reaches the merchant end, it provides needed security on the consumer side.
check out this whitepaper http://www.smartswipe.ca/images/stories/site/dynamic-ssl-white-paper.pdf