Securing credit card information, GnuPG?

[pantone187]

Hi everyone,

I'm a pretty novice PHP programmer as all I've done so far is to do simple registration forms for events. The data that's going from the from to the database (mySQL) didn't need much securing, but now I need to figure out a way to securely capture credit card information. This is one-time registration for only 120 people. I figured I wouldn't risk storing that, but now I'm trying to figure out how to encrypt that credit card information from the form to the email box of event coordinator. It seemed like installing and using GnuPG to encrypt and decrypt the data is a good idea but... I can't seem to figure out how I could install GnuPG on a shared host. I am not sure how to go about installing that...

Another idea I was tossing with was to have the php script write to a file to a secured directory... Any feedback? Thank you in advance.

[pbmods]

Heya, Pantone.

Do you need to store their entire credit card information? Or can you suffice with, say, the last 4 digits?

Unless you're charging subscriptions or you've been authorized to store the customers' information for the purpose of making future transactions, you don't need to (and in fact are not allowed to) store credit card information.

If you do need to store the full credit information, you can use GnuPG. I don't have a whole lot of experience using it programmatically, but you might find this article useful (http://www.alt-php-faq.org/local/65/).