Introduction

IsoFluent is a containerized intelligence layer for payment processing. It acts as a middleware service that ingests raw ISO 8583 hex dumps and returns structured, human-readable JSON enriched with fraud analysis.

Unlike traditional parsers, IsoFluent uses a localized Small Language Model (SLM) to understand context, making it capable of explaining why a transaction failed, not just what failed.

Installation v2.5.0

IsoFluent is distributed as a private Docker image. It is designed to run air-gapped within your VPC.

1. Pull the Image

# Login to the private registry (Creds provided upon license purchase)
docker login registry.isofluent.com

# Pull the latest engine
docker pull registry.isofluent.com/engine:latest

2. Run the Container

docker run -d \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v $(pwd)/config:/app/config \
  --name isofluent-engine \
  registry.isofluent.com/engine:latest

Configuration

The engine is controlled via a single YAML file mounted to /app/config/isofluent.yaml.

# /app/config/isofluent.yaml
server:
  port: 8080
  workers: 4

iso_spec:
  standard: "VISA_BASE_I" # Options: VISA_BASE_I, MC_IPM, ISO_87
  encoding: "EBCDIC"      # Options: ASCII, EBCDIC
  
# AI Analysis Settings
analysis:
  fraud_detection: true
  explainability: verbose # options: concise, verbose
  
privacy:
  mask_pan: true          # Masks Field 2 (Primary Account Number)
  mask_track2: true       # Masks Field 35

REST API Usage

Once running, the engine exposes a RESTful endpoint for real-time parsing.

POST /v1/parse

Accepts raw hex strings (with or without headers).

Request (cURL)

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/parse \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "hex": "0200B23A800122E000000000000004000000303030303030..."
  }'

Response (JSON)

{
  "meta": {
    "latency_ms": 12,
    "spec": "VISA_BASE_I"
  },
  "parsed": {
    "mti": "0200",
    "mti_desc": "Financial Transaction Request",
    "fields": {
      "3": {
        "value": "000000",
        "desc": "Purchase / Savings / None"
      },
      "39": {
        "value": "05",
        "desc": "Do Not Honor"
      }
    }
  },
  "ai_analysis": {
    "risk_level": "HIGH",
    "summary": "Transaction declined due to 'Do Not Honor'. Correlated with 3 previous attempts on this PAN within 60 seconds suggesting a velocity attack."
  }
}

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