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Comment by brryant | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! But unfortunately the reality is most startups never capture the first 6 numbers of credit cards if they are using a payment gateway (stripe, recurly, etc). Do you have ideas on how we can access the BIN without compromising security if we're using said services?

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Hi, I'm David, one of the engineers at Ribbon.

If you use any payment gateway, you need to send the full credit card number from the client so the gateway can return a token that identifies the card in their vault.

You can do the same and write some JS to get the first 6 numbers and send a GET request to our API without compromising security. The BIN (first 6 numbers of credit cards) is not considered the primary account number so it's safe to send (and even store).

Can I store a BIN and associate it to a customer without breaking PCI compliance?

You're allowed to store up to the first six and last four digits of a credit card number without encryption.

https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/pci_dss_v2.pd..., PCI DSS 3.3 would seem to be the most applicable section here.

Think most startups collect BINs. Its easily to have javascript grab the first 6 digits. You already have code that validates the card with luhn check and also determine card type, grab the first 6 characters and stick it in a hidden field.

I use it on the client side to show a country icon and credit card issuer, and use Stripe on the backend.

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