Patent attributes
A point-of-sale (POS) application is installed on a computing device of a merchant to process purchase transactions in conjunction with a network-accessible payment processing system. Software is also installed on the computing device to evaluate trustworthiness of the device and to prevent the device from performing sensitive operations such as purchase transactions when the device is deemed to be untrustworthy. The software obtains a security policy from the payment processing system and locally stores the security policy. The security policy specifies trust criteria and enforcement instructions, which can be updated from time to time when the payment processing system is accessible. The software evaluates device trustworthiness by gathering information regarding device conditions and comparing the information to the trust criteria. If the trust criteria are not satisfied, sensitive operations are disabled.
