The first step to set up your account is to sign up for a sandbox account. From this account you can obtain your security keys and test your implementation.

Follow these steps to sign up for a sandbox account:

Go to the
Visa Acceptance Solutions
Developer Center sandbox account sign up page:
sandbox.html
Enter your information into the sandbox account form and click
Create Account
.
Go to your email and find a message titled:
Merchant Registration Details
. Click the
Set up your username and password now
link.
Your browser opens the New User Sign Up wizard.
Enter the Organization ID and Contact email you supplied previously. Follow the wizard pages to add your name, a username, and a password.
Log in to the
Business Center
.
When you log in for the first time, you will be asked to verify your identity through a system-generated email to your email account.
Check your email for a message titled:
Visa Acceptance Solutions
Identification Code
. A passcode is included in the message.
Enter the passcode on the
Verify your Identity
page.
You should be directed to the
Business Center
home page.
You have successfully signed up for a sandbox account.

A P12 certificate and its private key are used with JSON Web Token message security. To create a P12 certificate, you must download a .p12 file from the

Business Center

and extract its private key.

Follow these steps to construct messages using JWTs:

Message-Level Encryption (MLE) enables you to store information or communicate with other parties while helping to prevent uninvolved parties from understanding the stored information. MLE is optional and supported only for payments services.

MLE provides enhanced security for message payload by using an asymmetric encryption technique (public-key cryptography). The message encryption is implemented with symmetric encryption using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Galois Counter Mode (GCM) with 256-bit key size. The encryption of keys is supported using RSA Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP) with 2048-bit key size. The encryption service is based on JSON Web Encryption (JWE), works on top of SSL and requires separate key-pairs for request and response legs of the transaction.

MLE is required for APIs that primarily deal with sensitive transaction data, both financial and non-financial. These are the types of sensitive transaction data:

MLE is supported when using JSON web tokens. For more information, see Message-Level Encryption Using JSON Web Tokens.

Each of these authentication schemes uses an encrypted payload, called the

JWE

. A JWE token has these five components, with each component separated by a period (.):

JOSE header containing four elements:
"alg": "RSA-OAEP-256", //The algorithm used to encrypt the CEK
"enc": "A256GCM",  //The algorithm used to encrypt the message
"iat": "1702493653" //The current timestamp in milliseconds
"kid": "keyId" //The serial number of shared public cert for encryption of CEK
JWE encrypted key
JWE initialization vector
JWE additional authentication data (AAD)
JWE ciphertext and authentication tag

When you are ready to process payments in a live environment, you must transition your account to a live status with a valid configuration for your chosen payment processor. When live, your transaction data flows through the production

Visa Acceptance Solutions

gateway, to your processor, and on to the appropriate payment network.

To transition your account:

It may take up to three business days to complete a MID activation request.