Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice of securing communication and data through encryption techniques. In the payments industry, cryptography plays a pivotal role in maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of financial transactions conducted over electronic channels. It’s used to hide things like credit card details and personal data in the event a crook tries to hijack the transaction mid-submission,

For transactions protected by cryptography, high-level algorithms are used to scramble all the card data before it goes anywhere. Information is converted into ciphertext that can only be deciphered through the corresponding decryption key.

So who has that key? Only the authorized recipient on the other end of the submission. That means that even if the electronic submission is somehow intercepted, all the hacker would get is a bunch of gobbledygook that can’t be used for anything.