ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
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ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#2Fun times reviewing the masking logic of credit card data spewed out in system logs, in base64-encoded (or god forbid, EBCDIC-encoded base64-encoded) ISO 8583.
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#3I wonder if this is the standard that drove Charles Stross slightly insane and led to Accelerando.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
Actually based on the timing, this is probably the new better standard that replaced the obscure protocols of the 70s.
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#4The type of protocol (message type, bitmap to define fields, followed by a set of fixed and variable length values) is pretty normal for the time it was developed in. Many low level things are basically packed C-structs with this type of protocol. It comes with some pitfalls on the receiver side to be careful validating dynamic field length and refusing to read past end of message or allocate an infinite buffer. But all of those are well understood by now.
What I find baffling is that this "standard" does not specify how to encode the fields or even the message type. Pick anything, binary, ASCII, BCD, EBCDIC. That doesn't work as a standard, every implementation could send you nearly any random set of bytes with no way for the receiver to make sense of them.
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#5> "ISO 8583: The language of credit cards"
"ISO 8583: The language of both debit and credit cards"
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#6A lot of payments chatter on here recently and patio11 throwing out some great content as well. May I ask where this pretty visual explanation website was 25 years ago? ;) Oh the woes of programming ISO8583 as I see another commented on EBCDIC which adds in a whole other level of mind numbing when passing between the endians. It was a fun experience however back in the early 2000s when I worked in isolation with Discover card to get the GUID field added to the ISO8583 specification.
We are living in changing times on many fronts and the worlds financial systems is one of those new battlefields. Many are ignorant as to what is occurring but with big tech owning their own payments ecosystems this should be insight for others not aware as we are absolutely certain to see more following their lead. Some of those others following are entire countries, they are just a bigger business after all, as it is already happening for those aware and a small select few are doing i.t.
Stay Healthy!
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#7Oh, this format was fun. You could see history unfold when parsing it. The messages I parsed were ISO-8583 with ~EBCDIC~ no, BCD. But one field contained XML. And the XML had an embedded JSON. The inner format matched the fashion trend of the year when someone had to extend the message with extra data. :-)
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#8Oh, this format was fun. You could see history unfold when parsing it. The messages I parsed were ISO-8583 with ~EBCDIC~ no, BCD. But one field contained XML. And the XML had an embedded JSON. The inner format matched the fashion trend of the year when someone had to extend the message with extra data. :-)
Fascinating, I don't think I've ever seen an XML field! Do you remember which network that was for?
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#9A lot of payments chatter on here recently and patio11 throwing out some great content as well. May I ask where this pretty visual explanation website was 25 years ago? ;) Oh the woes of programming ISO8583 as I see another commented on EBCDIC which adds in a whole other level of mind numbing when passing between the endians. It was a fun experience however back in the early 2000s when I worked in isolation with Disc…
I learned a lot more about this discussing the PCI/DSS [0] regulation
framework here [1]. It's about to change to a new 4.0 in 2025 which
means that to use or run any payments system you'll have to meet ever
more stringent regulation. This is going to start applying to other
pseudo currencies (in game value tokens etc) if they exceed certain
value and scale. At present Visa and Mastercard have a big stake in
defining this (capturing the regulator).
Interestingly local real (non-digital) currencies like the Brixton Pound [2] and other local paper scrip seem to escape this, which seems a boost for paper technologies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Sec...
Re: ISO 8583: The language of credit cards
#10Oh, this format was fun. You could see history unfold when parsing it. The messages I parsed were ISO-8583 with ~EBCDIC~ no, BCD. But one field contained XML. And the XML had an embedded JSON. The inner format matched the fashion trend of the year when someone had to extend the message with extra data. :-)
Fascinating, I don't think I've ever seen an XML field! Do you remember which network that was for?
We were the issuer. So these were probably the payment processor's extensions. But we were issuing MasterCards.