APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ENSURING SECURITY DURING ENTRY OF CREDIT ACCOUNT INFORMATION AT A PUBLIC TERMINAL

摘要

A credit account access system for ensuring security against pilfering of credit information including credit account number and the corresponding PIN during entry of such information by a user at a public terminal. The credit account access system of the present invention generates a pseudo-randomly selected scrambling code for each credit transaction at a public terminal. This pseudo-randomly selected scrambling code determines the instructions to the user at the public terminal to enter in a sequence of segments of the credit account number and the corresponding PIN. Such instructions are readily received only by the user at the public terminal. With such a credit account access system, the thief observing a user at a public terminal sees the user entering a different sequence of numbers for each credit transaction. The sequence of numbers contains scrambled segments of the credit account number and the PIN that an observing thief cannot readily decode to determine the actual credit account number and the corresponding actual PIN. In addition, because the user is instructed to scramble the credit account information and the corresponding PIN via the public terminal, the user does not carry around an added device for the added security.