Peripherals such as the currency detectors for coins and banknotes found in a diverse range of automatic payment equipment such as transportation, ticketing, payphones, amusement machines, and retail cash management use ccTalk to talk to the host controller.
[1]: 20 It was developed at a company called Coin Controls (hence "cc") on the outskirts of Manchester in north-west England mainly by Engineer Andrew William Barson.
ccTalk protocol stacks have been implemented on a range of devices from tiny Microchip microcontrollers with 512 bytes of ROM to powerful ARM7 32-bit processors.
[1]: 12–13 The protocol supports all standard operations for electronic devices such as flash upgrading of firmware, secure transfer of data and detailed diagnostic information.
Advantages of ccTalk include low cost UART technology, a simple-to-understand packet structure, an easily expandable command interface and no licensing requirements.
The latter affords the protocol a good deal of popularity in a crowded and highly competitive field similar to open-source software.
[3][4] DES is considered insecure right from the start due to the small key size and has been further analyzed, but it does slow down fraudsters who might insert devices to tap onto the communication wire.
The use of DH prevents eavesdropping of the key exchange, while AES is still unbroken – meaning an impossibly long brute-force process would be required.