IP Filtering

By verifying the source address of all connections to the acquirer, or the value of all HTTP-REFERER values, some risk can be mitigated. This mitigation is not complete because the HTTP-REFERER value could be spoofed and is not cleanly implemented by many browsers[1].

As well, the management of all merchant IP numbers greatly complicates system management for the acquirer. Whenever merchants migrate or expand to a new machine with a new IP number, they would have to inform the acquirer to enable this new IP number. When merchants abandon an old IP number or change upstream Internet providers, they would have to inform the acquirer to remove the old numbers and insert new ones. There are also many times when a firewall performs an unexpected NAT for a server, thus remapping the server’s own IP number to an unanticipated value.

Finally, IP Filtering offers the merchant no security that the e-mail confirming order authorization originated from the acquirer.

For all these reasons, IP filtering is not a sufficient mechanism for resolving the security issues posed by the scenarios above.