GoNow secures EMV portable eWallet and universal card patent

GoNow Technologies, a developer of reprogrammable companion cards for mobile eWallet technology, has won a key US patent that will allow the secure storage and two way communication from reprogrammable card-based EMV chip and a smartphone-based eWallet.

This invention means that EMV can be added to reprogrammable cards and will insure a new level of card security.

The new patent complements GoNow’s first granted patent for secure two-way phone to card communication, with respect to the movement of traditional card information into and out of an e-wallet, Universal Card with magnetic stripe, and Secure Element.

As in traditional EMV cards, the GoNow Card provides a trusted environment within the card’s Secure Element (SE) in which the card issuer can securely encode and store the cardholder’s security credentials as well as the cryptographic keys. The secure information is loaded and stored by the card issuer onto the EMV card at the time the card is personalized.

This process of loading and storing the secure data is identical regardless whether the card is a traditional EMV card or a GoNow Card. The GoNow Card can be configured as either a traditional EMV contact card, or EMV contactless card (which can use NFC communication with the smartphone). The type of card is determined at the time card is personalized by the issuer.

The GoNow Card’s Secure Element acts as a vault making the secure data impervious to access by fraudulent parties. The level of security and encryption built into the GoNow Card’s SE ensures that the card information cannot be extracted and used to clone the EMV card. The methods in which the EMV card is authenticated for both online and offline transaction (DDA, SDA, CDA or CVM) are identical to the methods used by the issuers to authenticate a traditional EMV card.

When paired with any eWallet application on a smartphone, a single reprogrammable GoNow Card can store more than 50 credit, debit, ATM, loyalty or gift cards. The user simply selects the payment or other card on the phone eWallet and the magstripe on the card is instantly programmed with the key data for the card selected. The GoNow Card can then be used at any traditional magstripe, EMV, Dip, ATM or other reader, with no changes necessary to current retailer terminals or back office systems.

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