How Do ATMs Verify Your PIN in Just ONE Minute? 🔐 | Simple Cryptography Explained

Have you ever wondered how ATMs can know that your entered pin is correct but, yet still your bank confidently claims that your credentials are highly secured? Or in other words, how to verify a pin without learning it. This is where cryptography, specifically encryption is very important! Modern-day ATM encryption essentially used the TDES standard which is a complicated algorithm but, I am going to discuss a simplified form of encryption which essentially most popular encryption methods are built on. Imagine you are setting up an ATM card at your bank. Your pin is encoded into a very large prime number. This number is then multiplied by another large prime number which results in an insanely huge number! This huge number is stored with your account in the bank's server while your pin is kept safe with you only. So when you go to an ATM to withdraw, your pin is verified by checking that it is a divisor of the large number attached to your account. Which is a very easy task for a computer.
Now, what if a bank employer happens to find this large number attached to your account and for some reason, they also had your ATM card. Well, they would still need to know your pin which is impractical to find with current computers. This is because finding factors of very large prime numbers is very difficult. In mathematics, we say that this has high computational complexity. So although the system can verify you, it is unable to learn you all thanks to Prime numbers!


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