Irdeto Cloakware Secures PayU Payments

As commerce and payments continue to expand into digital spaces, so too does the threat of fraud — a fact that digital platform and application security provider Irdeto Cloakware knows well.

Founded in 1969, Irdeto has over 50 years of experience working with software application providers, connected device manufacturers, pay media operators and content creators to secure their products and business models from the threat of fraud and cybercrime.

“Irdeto currently protects over 5 billion devices and software applications around the world,” said David Jones, global head of payments and banking at Irdeto. “Security is the key way to power new business models, share data and enable services. For us, it’s about using security to drive innovation.”

Jones said he is currently leading Irdeto’s initiative to move beyond media and into the payments and banking space. Irdeto Cloakware’s Payments & Banking solutions use whitebox cryptography to secure all transaction information, including financial data, credit card details and users’ personal information.

“Whitebox technology is the most advanced way to secure software,” Jones said. “It’s typically applied to mobile applications — in places where you want to have a solution that’s near the robustness of hardware.”

Irdeto Cloakware’s Payments & Banking solutions come with a number of business benefits, Jones said. For payment gateways, Irdeto’s solutions are able to reduce the burden of PCI costs on end merchants who opt for a hosted payment page, as well as increase conversion and reduce dropoffs.

“Our whole solution,” Jones said, “is based on disrupting the attacker’s business model. We apply robust software security in the browser without browser plugins. It works agnostically across modern browsers. It creates a total mismatch of effort and energy that would be required to attack such a robust solution versus the time that it’s actually exposed.”

Jones stressed that Irdeto Cloakware is able to offer managed security service with a light touch. “There’s no custom browser,” he said, “no plugins and a lightweight, speedy integration. These are the fundamentals of the solution.”

As of mid-December, leading online payments service provider PayU implemented Irdeto Cloakware for Payments & Banking solutions to prevent theft and fraudulent transactions for its customers.

“For PayU and the emerging markets that we operate in, security and fraud is a big issue,” said Guy Duncan, CTO at PayU. “We are also a payments service provider pushing into FinTech, online lending, etc. And that is where the hackers go. We want to innovate in terms of technology and security. That will be the differentiation that makes us stronger and that much better in our markets.”

Duncan said that to innovate PayU’s security required a solution that could meet the security needs of traditional PSPs, data-rich, FinTech-based technologies and services, as well APIs. “We have a complicated ecosystem of different platforms,” Duncan said, “and we found that we can handle these use cases with Irdeto’s stack.”

At the time of the interview, Duncan noted that PayU had just gone live with Irdeto’s stack with just a few of their merchants, but that, by mid-2017, that number could be closer to 200,000.

“In some of our markets,” Duncan said, “mobile devices can account for as many as 90 percent of transactions. We needed a solution that lives in that mobile space, that really secures those APIs. Irdeto can be a really big part of that story.”

“Our goal is to be able to give our customers a set of solutions that they can trust so they can focus on innovating,” said Jones. “They don’t have to worry about becoming security experts. We’re happy in our position to take that trust for our customers.”