Gemalto announced the launch of the industry’s first payment hardware security module, SafeNet Luna EFT Payment HSM.

The international digital security company use a single hardware security module (HSM) to support security applications and protect sensitive payment information and transactions, allowing financial services organisations to simplify cryptographic operations.

The new partitioning capability of Gemalto’s SafeNet Luna EFT Payment HSM 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 organisations 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.

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 authorisation speeds in the cloud and credit, debit, e-wallet and chip cards while meeting FIPS 140-2 Level 3 and PCI-HSM 2.0 standard

Rob Westervelt, analyst at IDC, said: “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.”

Todd Moore, senior vice president for Encryption Products at Gemalto, added: “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 US$1trillion transactions worldwide every day.”

Written from press release by Leah Alger