Gemalto launches payment hardware security module to ease encryption operations

Digital Security provider Gemalto has announced the launch of the industry's first payment hardware security module (HSM) to include partitioning as an advanced security feature.

The newly launched capability will allow 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.

Today, 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.

"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," said Todd Moore, Senior Vice President for Encryption Products at Gemalto.

Each partition functions as 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. 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," said Rob Westervelt, Analyst at IDC.

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.

Further, it helps to manage large volumes of cryptographic security functions simultaneously to secure the growing number of online, peer-to-peer and mobile payment transactions.

Also, banks can access and integrate with a wider range of point of sale (POS) terminals through its extensive partner network, and scale transactional processing for faster authorization speeds in the cloud and credit, debit, e-wallet and chip cards while meeting FIPS 140??-2 Level III and PCI-HSM 2.0 standard?

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