<quote who="Brian Fahrlander"> > Wow; that wouldn't be very enjoyable for the customers, either- when > their time is nearing expiration I need to invent a new infrastructure > to alert them, pause the session while they go get change (involving the > otherwise busy resturant personnel, introducing human error, etc) and > then they come sit down at their session again. Each time they run over > their time. You could always trust your customers and just let them run over and pay the balance when they are finished. If I remember correctly, Kinkos required me to pay in advance. I just put more money on the card than I thought I would need. > I don't see what's so insecure about the system; another server > does, in fact maintain a list of cards and their user-ids, reached by a > secure channel in a highly secure NOC. The numbers/etc are never written > down anyplace locally, just used for the authentication process and > tossed. The problem is your customers. They will have physical access to a general purpose machine. These types of machines are a little more difficult to secure. Gaining root access to a machine is much easier when you are local. > There should be no way a previous user's credit card information > _exists_ on the local machine, so as to be revealed. Sure, they can > peek and poke into memory (if they were root) and eventually find it, or > remnants of it, but with 1/2G of ram, that's a lot to search....and it'd > be gone in seconds. Imagine I am a customer who wants to steal credit card information. My only major challenge with your system would be to gain root access. Then I setup a network traffic sniffer and harvest everyone's credit card information. I can then come back later to retrieve the data I've collected. I also have other options. I could try to compromise the server storing the data. I could access all the other clients and install a program locally. I could charge the card as soon as it's entered... Like I said, if you use this method, you should spend a good amount of time checking logs and network traffic. > The aim of the idea was to avoid the classic get-up-and-pay and > require-local-assistance problems the other packages have. I understand > the danger of exposed CC info; I didn't have to work at CheckPoint or > Bank of America to learn that. :> There is a good reason those packages require that. > But I seriously appreciate the conversation on all this; you seem to > be ahead of the game in this area. Do you handle this kinda info for > your dayjob? Security seems to be where my job is heading. I'm not sure I like it, but I don't have much of a choice. lol
