Secure Proximity Payment Protocol

Abstract

Mobile devices and wireless technologies have been coupled together to build a huge impact on human lives. Mobile payment is such an stimulating application currently in development while short range wireless technologies have expressly provided a new direction for emerging various mobile payment solutions. Mobile payments have received a noteworthy amount of attraction recently in the business globe and it is expected to grow at a significant rate in the near future. Short range wireless communication technologies that are already available on mobile devices have great potentials of bringing the mobile payments swiftly to the business community. This research initially examines the potential short range wireless technologies for mobile payments. Then it is concentrated on how these contactless technologies can be simply, easily and securely used in mobile payments. As a result, a new secure proximity payment protocol is presented that holds several rewarding features such as high security, good usability, support for both macro and micro payments and having no exceptional hardware requirements. Its design is based on electronic cheque concept and cryptographic key establishment protocols. Compared to paper cheques, electronic cheques considerably differ from the fact that unprotected data can be easily modified or copied by anyone. In addition, most of the short distance wireless technologies offer no inbuilt security other than its short operational range. Therefore, security is extremely taken into consideration to make the protocol resistant to possible security issues. A proof of this design concept implementation is carried out with two Android mobile phones and one laptop computer, proving that it can simply work using only available equipments currently in the market. In the evaluation of the protocol, several security issues are concerned and proven that each of them can be avoided using this secure proximity payment protocol. Also, the performance of the protocol is measured considering various options in order to verify that the novel protocol is practicable to deploy in the real business environment.