Are there any encryption / secure sockets?

[John Ralls]

On Jan 27, 2007, at 5:21 AM, Tommy W wrote:

>
> Btw, does anyone know how you 'talk with a bank' ?
> I aim to develop a program which will handle some money, meaning  
> insertion of
> money through visa -> bank account  and the other way around bank  
> account ->
> visa   should work.
> I seriously hope encryption is used in these cirumstances :)
> So my question is if anyone knows what kind of encryption is most  
> commonly
> used and perhaps some links for further reading? been googling for  
> hours ,
> but me and google doesn't come along very well
>
> /Tommy

Ah, that's different.
Assuming by "visa" you mean the credit/debit card company, talk to  
the folks who handle your merchant account. They likely have a WWW  
API already set up for you to program to. When I did this, it was  
with Verisign, and their system was called PayflowLink. The part  
between the CC processor and the bank is handled by them, and uses  
the banking system network. (Which is, in the US at any rate,  
logically separate from the Internet; different protocols above the  
MAC layer and heavily encrypted and authenticated. Only banks and  
other financial companies like PayPal and WorldPay have access to that.)
If you don't already have a CC processor, do take a look at PayPal.  
They also have an HTTPS interface for handling transactions, which I  
have used. Works quite well.

I suggest that you look at a library which handles all of the HTTPS  
rather than rolling your own on top of openssl.  A list of candidates  
is at http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/competitors.html.
If you're not averse to perl, you could use wxPerl for your front end  
and LWP for the back end. There's likely a similar Python backend  
library if your preferences run in that direction.

Regards,
John Ralls