Secure Electronic Mobile Cheque Book

Abstract

Cheque transaction is one of the highly used money transfer methods in financial world. Even though online money transfer methods are also used in these days, cheque transactions are still popular among many people. But, the existing manual process associates with many issues such as high cost, time consuming, having large impact on environment due to high paper consumption and cheque frauds. In this thesis an attempt is made to explore a way to use the latest mobile technologies to execute day to day cheque transaction securely and efficiently by addressing above issues. Base concept of the proposed M-Cheque system is, facilitating to use digital cheque paper on smart phone of the customer and allow him to transfer it securely to the recipient. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is used for the communication between issuer’s and receiver’s smart phones. After receiver deposits the cheque, issuer bank, receiver bank and clearing system communicate with each other to process the cheque and finally settle both parties’ accounts by providing a faster service. Security is a main concern for this application and data transferred through this system is secured using cryptographic concepts such as asymmetric key algorithm, symmetric key algorithm and digital signatures. Also, client server communication is secured using Secure Sockets Layer protocol. System was evaluated by comparing it with the current cheque processing system under four categories such as cost, time, environmental impact and security. It was concluded that the system has achieved its goals which are low cost, less time consuming, environmental friendly and higher level of security. Still only less number of people uses smart phones and only few types of smart phones are equipped with NFC are the main limitations of the proposed system. Despite those limitations, there is a wide space for M-Cheque to become successful due to the promising future of NFC in mobile payments, gradually increasing use of smart phones and lots of new mobile device vendors are applying NFC in their new mobile products.