Apple Pay, the recently released mobile payment system on Apple’s iPhone 6, is making waves in the security community and being praised for the attention it provides to securing credit card transactions. Tokenization, the technology underpinning Apple Pay’s security model, is not new, but Apple Pay may provide the impetus for this technology to go mainstream.

From the consumer’s perspective, Apple Pay is an ideal way to conduct a transaction with a merchant because it preserves the consumer’s privacy during the transaction. During a normal credit card transaction, the merchant reads the consumer’s name and credit card number from the magnetic stripe on the back of the card. During an Apple Pay transaction, the merchant receives only an anonymized one-time-use code that facilitates the transaction.

Read More: Could Apple Pay fundamentally change PCI DSS compliance?

Published March 8, 2015 on SearchSecurity.com