According to the source, the patent is for an entire ‘touchless’ phone-based payment system. The technology that Apple describes would use two different types of wireless communication, first to send a signal from an iPhone to a nearby receiver to initiate the payment. This could be done via NFC, as well as with iBeacons or other Bluetooth-based communication. A second wireless interface would be used to communicate data from the point-of-sale terminal to the actual payment processing back-end online.
Apple has also built in a security method that’s designed to protect user data. This ‘secure element’ referred to in the patent filing works by making sure that a user’s actual sensitive payment data is stored only on a user’s device separately. To make the payment, an alias is then generated that the processing back-end can recognise, and when a user bumps their device against the POS to pay, that alias alone is transmitted along with a cryptographic code. The code is decrypted by the back-end, which then compares the alias to the one it stores.
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