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American Express Seeks To Swap Card Numbers For Secure Tokens

Posted by Soulskill on from the teaching-an-old-dog-old-tricks dept.

jfruh writes: One of the fundamental problems of the electronic payment business is that it's by and large based on the fundamentally insecure infrastructure of the credit card system, where anyone who has your 16-digit card number can make purchases on your account. American Express is trying to improve its security by moving towards the use of unique tokens for online purchases.

3 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Make it simple by vux984 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just give me a card that plugs into the USB port and that I can charge up at the 7-11 with cash...

    And then when someone steals it, or it just spontaneously stops working one day... sure you'll still be ok with that?

  2. Re:Finally.. by Midnight_Falcon · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you're going to troll at least you give the benefit of the doubt on acronyms. OTP = One Time Password ...NOT one time pad.

    Here's a reference so you can avoid further confusion and undeserved insult: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

  3. summary fail by ahziem · · Score: 3, Informative

    Among popular cards, American Express uniquely has 15 digits. (VISA, Mastercard, and Discover have 16 digits.)