How Apple Pay Uses 3-D Secure for Internet Payments

In a comment on an earlier post on Apple Pay where I was trying to figure out how Apple Pay works over NFC, R Stone suggested looking at the Apple Pay developer documentation (Getting Started with Apple Pay, PassKit Framework Reference and Payment Token Format Reference), guessing that Apple Pay would carry out transactions over the Internet in essentially the same way as over NFC. I followed the suggestion and, although I didn’t find any useful information applicable to NFC payments in the documentation, I did find interesting information that seems worth reporting.

It turns out that Apple Pay relies primarily on the 3-D Secure protocol for Internet payments. EMV may also be used, but merchant support for EMV is optional, whereas support for 3-D Secure is required (see the Discussion under Working with Payments in the documentation of the PKPaymentRequest class). It makes sense to rely primarily on a protocol such as 3-D Secure that was intended specifically for Internet payments rather than on a protocol intended for in-store transactions such as EMV. Merchants that only sell over the Internet should not be burdened with the complexities of EMV. But Apple Pay makes use of 3-D Secure in a way that is very different from how the protocol is traditionally used on the web. In this post I’ll try to explain how the merchant interacts with Apple Pay for both 3-D Secure and EMV transactions over the Internet, then how Apple Pay seems to be using 3-D Secure. I’ll also point out a couple of surprises I found in the documentation. Continue reading “How Apple Pay Uses 3-D Secure for Internet Payments”