PIN pad
keypad for financial transactions
A PIN pad or PIN entry device is an electronic device used in a debit, credit or smart card-based transaction to accept and encrypt the cardholder's personal identification number (PIN).
PIN pads are normally used with payment terminals, automated teller machines or integrated point of sale devices in which an electronic cash register is responsible for taking the sale amount and initiating/handling the transaction. The PIN pad is required to read the card and allow the PIN to be securely entered and encrypted before it is sent to the bank. In some cases, with chip cards, the PIN is only transferred from the PIN pad to card and it is verified by the chip card. In this case the PIN does not need to be sent to the bank or card scheme for verification. (This is known as "offline PIN verification".)
Like some stand-alone point of sale devices, PIN pads are equipped with hardware and software security features to ensure that the encryption keys and the PIN are erased if someone tries to tamper with the device. The PIN is encrypted immediately on entry and an encrypted PIN block is created. This encrypted PIN block is erased as soon as it has been sent from the PIN pad to the attached point of sale device and/or the chip card. PINs are encrypted using a variety of encryption schemes, the most common in 2010 being triple DES.
PIN pads must be approved to the standards required by the payment card industry to ensure that they provide adequate security at the point of PIN entry and for the PIN encryption process. ISO 9564 is the international standard for PIN management and security, and specifies some required and recommended characteristics of PIN entry devices.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “PIN pad” is keypad for financial transactions. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through keypad, financial and transactions, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “keypad for financial transactions” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 21, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q1340113. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “PIN pad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.