LAS VEGAS — A software firm is offering retailers a method formaking sure they don't retain credit and debit card information intheir point of sale computer systems where hackers can access andsteal it.

Shift4, which describes itself as “a leading developer of securefinancial transaction processing software,” explained that itssoftware uses something called “tokenization” to prevent cardinformation from being stored on a retailer in the first place.

With “tokenization,” the merchant swipes the card and sends theinformation through a gateway to a processor and receives back anapproval. But instead of sending the card information itself backto the merchant and the POS system, it is converted to a globallyunique, randomized representation of the credit card number that is16 characters long. Only the token is stored in the system.