While historically a slow moving industry, the ATM industry is moving forward with a OS agnostic platform that aims to transform the industry. The platform, called XFS4IoT, aims to provide benefits to vendors, banks and users.
While historically a slow moving industry, the ATM industry is moving forward with a OS agnostic platform that aims to transform the industry. The platform, called XF4IoT, aims to provide benefits to vendors, banks and users.
Rob Hunter, head of sales and business development for North America at KAL ATM Software discussed the standard during a panel at the ATMIA conference held from Feb. 7-9 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The acronym XFS stands for extension for financial services. Hunter said it controls the interface of the Windows OS to the ATM's devices such as the card reader and cash dispenser. This standard powers 90% of ATMs in operation today worldwide.
The XFS is managed by the CEN/XFS committee which consists of major industry players including Diebold Nixdorf and NCR and is open to anyone. The committee also considers new devices and develops APIs that hardware vendors can use to develop their own XFS layers. Vendors are responsible for testing, development and testing of XFS for their own systems.
"All the XFS committee is responsible for is putting together the specs," Hunter said.
However, Hunter noted that the current XFS standard has been around for 20 years and with a system that's been around for that long.
"It's time to make changes," he said.
The XFS4IoT platform offers new functionality and as it's platform agnostic, there is no need for customers to be limited by the Windows OS.
"When people previously asked us about Linux, it was a hard no. Now with XFS4, that's not the case."
Although most vendors will continue to use Windows, the features opens the door for further innovation.
"Being platform agnostic helps futureproof FIs for whatever OS they want to shift to or, probably more significantly, will emerge in the future," Derek Henderson, senior product manager, NCR Corp. said in a previous story on ATM Marketplace. "We expect vendors and FIs to continue to operate with Microsoft Windows for the next five to seven years due to the level of work required to make the OS change when currently there's not a strong enough alternative to Microsoft. Being platform agnostic is important because XFS4IOT provides greater flexibility for the future — we can't predict what the future developments could be, but we can develop the standard to be more open and simpler to integrate."
However, the standard isn't only platform agnostic, it offers many other advantages, such as the fact it is cloud-based. While users can use XFS4IoT on physical devices, it can also take advantage of the cloud.
"Cloud native enables you to integrate devices from multiple manufactures," Hunter said.
With the physical version, XFS4 uses an edge model that connects via web modules rather than XFS manager.
Another change is security. The standard aims to make the ATMs more secure with pre-shared tokens created by HMAC/SHA256. These tokens are encrypted by an hardware security model and decrypted by an hardware security element.
With the keys, Hunter said they are, "Protected against reply by nonce. Once keys are used, it's useless. They contains all information to validate a transaction and no more."
In order to manage the keys, Hunter said TR34 supplies remote key loading, TR31 provides the key exchange and it is, "supported by any device not just encrypting pin pads."
Hunter said these security measures are meant to prevent any sort of attack, including:
Lastly, Hunter discussed how the standard is being continually developed by the XFS SP-Dev workgroup, which works with the FS committee and includes around 75 companies with monthly meetings held by KAL.
It aims to "create an XFS4IoT SP Framework and provide source code hosted on GitHub," Hunter said.
Bradley Cooper is the editor of ATM Marketplace and was previously the editor of Digital Signage Today. His background is in information technology, advertising, and writing.
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