"R. David Murray" wrote:
OK, any of you out there who have thought about ecommerce, cryptography, and zope, I've got a design question for you. Actually, this question is independent of zope, but I need to solve it in a zope context.
You have a ZCommerce site. You accept credit cards, and securely communicate with a CC processor to verify the transacton. Now, you want to save the CC# and other info in case something needs to be done with it later, and probably store the CC# so this customer doesn't have to type it in again later. Regardless of whether you are storing this info in a relational database or in the ZODB, how do you secure that information?
Step one, prepare for a fight with Amazon <0.5 wink> Personally, I would store the actual data on a seperate server, not accessible to the public. When you need to place the order/verify funds/etc, your ZopeApp talks to the private server, which returns either the data needed, or a yes or no result. I prefer the latter, since the actual processing with the CC clearinghouse can be done from there, thus largeley eliminating the threat (though not destroying it entirely of couse) at the webserver.