Managing near field communication (NFC) payment applications through cloud computing

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is a short-range radio communication channel which enables users to exchange data between devices. NFC provides a contactless technology for data transmission between smart phones, Personal Computers (PCs), Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and such devices. It enables the mobile phone to act as identification and a credit card for customers. However, the NFC chip can act as a reader as well as a card, and also be used to design symmetric protocols. Having several parties involved in NFC ecosystem and not having a common standard affects the security of this technology where all the parties are claiming to have access to client’s information (e.g. bank account details). The dynamic relationships of the parties in an NFC transaction process make them partners in a way that sometimes they share their access permissions on the applications that are running in the service environment. These parties can only access their part of involvement as they are not fully aware of each other’s rights and access permissions. The lack of knowledge between involved parties makes the management and ownership of the NFC ecosystem very puzzling. To solve this issue, a security module that is called Secure Element (SE) is designed to be the base of the security for NFC. However, there are still some security issues with SE personalization, management, ownership and architecture that can be exploitable by attackers and delay the adaption of NFC payment technology. Reorganizing and describing what is required for the success of this technology have motivated us to extend the current NFC ecosystem models to accelerate the development of this business area. One of the technologies that can be used to ensure secure NFC transactions is cloud computing which offers wide range advantages compared to the use of SE as a single entity in an NFC enabled mobile phone. We believe cloud computing can solve many issues in regards to NFC application management. Therefore, in the first contribution of part of this thesis we propose a new payment model called “NFC Cloud Wallet". This model demonstrates a reliable structure of an NFC ecosystem which satisfies the requirements of an NFC payment during the development process in a systematic, manageable, and effective way

Decentralized Identity and Access Management Framework for Internet of Things Devices

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) domain is about connecting people and devices and systems together via sensors and actuators, to collect meaningful information from the devices surrounding environment and take actions to enhance productivity and efficiency. The proliferation of IoT devices from around few billion devices today to over 25 billion in the next few years spanning over heterogeneous networks defines a new paradigm shift for many industrial and smart connectivity applications. The existing IoT networks faces a number of operational challenges linked to devices management and the capability of devices’ mutual authentication and authorization. While significant progress has been made in adopting existing connectivity and management frameworks, most of these frameworks are designed to work for unconstrained devices connected in centralized networks. On the other hand, IoT devices are constrained devices with tendency to work and operate in decentralized and peer-to-peer arrangement. This tendency towards peer-to-peer service exchange resulted that many of the existing frameworks fails to address the main challenges faced by the need to offer ownership of devices and the generated data to the actual users. Moreover, the diversified list of devices and offered services impose that more granular access control mechanisms are required to limit the exposure of the devices to external threats and provide finer access control policies under control of the device owner without the need for a middleman. This work addresses these challenges by utilizing the concepts of decentralization introduced in Distributed Ledger (DLT) technologies and capability of automating business flows through smart contracts. The proposed work utilizes the concepts of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) for establishing a decentralized devices identity management framework and exploits Blockchain tokenization through both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to build a self-controlled and self-contained access control policy based on capability-based access control model (CapBAC). The defined framework provides a layered approach that builds on identity management as the foundation to enable authentication and authorization processes and establish a mechanism for accounting through the adoption of standardized DLT tokenization structure. The proposed framework is demonstrated through implementing a number of use cases that addresses issues related identity management in industries that suffer losses in billions of dollars due to counterfeiting and lack of global and immutable identity records. The framework extension to support applications for building verifiable data paths in the application layer were addressed through two simple examples. The system has been analyzed in the case of issuing authorization tokens where it is expected that DLT consensus mechanisms will introduce major performance hurdles. A proof of concept emulating establishing concurrent connections to a single device presented no timed-out requests at 200 concurrent connections and a rise in the timed-out requests ratio to 5% at 600 connections. The analysis showed also that a considerable overhead in the data link budget of 10.4% is recorded due to the use of self-contained policy token which is a trade-off between building self-contained access tokens with no middleman and link cost

Applying Blockchain Technology to Financial Market’s Infrastructure

The utilization of blockchain technology has gained widespread acceptance across various domains in recent years. Among them, blockchain integration in the financial sector is particularly noteworthy. Blockchain technology offers a range of features that can address various challenges in the financial industry, including decentralization, transparency, enhanced security, and tamper-proofing. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the issues that persist in academia and industry and address them through blockchain technology. The research for this thesis was divided into three major stages. The first stage involved conducting an academic survey through a comprehensive literature review. The aim was to identify the pain points that academics have identified and to narrow down the problems that concern the academic community. The second stage involved collecting requirements from industry experts. This helped to identify the real-world issues that currently exist in the financial industry. Based on these issues, the research moved on to the next stage. The third stage involved an experimental study, further divided into two parts. Part 1 involved designing and developing a blockchain-based issuance and trading system for financial products. This system aimed to enhance participant trust, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. Part 2 involved the development of a risk monitoring system for blockchain-based financial products. This system aimed to assist participants in monitoring market risks, providing them with risk warning coefficients, and reducing the probability of systemic risks in the market. The results of this thesis demonstrate that blockchain technology's feasibility and integration can positively impact financial markets from an experimental perspective. It can be helpful to adopt blockchain technology for financial and FinTech industries

Understanding blockchain technology in retail branding for enhancing customer experience and strengthening the retail brand-customer relationship

Abstract. Though the concept of branding used to associate with the manufacturers, over the past decades, to survive the fierce competition in today’s business world, branding becomes indispensable for all business organizations including retail. Branding is important for the retail organization for delivering their brand promises and for increasing their brand equity. The growth of the internet and technological advancement has shaped the way the brand used to communicate. These technological advancements have opened new avenues and opportunities as well as created new challenges for the retail brands. Besides, in recent years, customers became more concern about society and the environment due to the adverse effects of human and business activities. Most of the customers now want and expect products that have been sustainably procured, produced, transported, and fairly traded. This sustainability concern of the customers is creating pressure on the retailers to act in a responsible way towards society and the environment. But the brands are suffering in spite of trying hard to deliver products in a sustainable way to meet the customers’ expectation, as customers are reluctant to rely on brand’s promises and hesitate to buy due to the lack of availability of authentic and credible information about the products and services retailers offer and is resulting in poor brand loyalty and declined brand equity. The aim of this thesis is to understand customer’s perspective on identifying the implications of blockchain technology for solving these problems of trust on retail brands and explore the way for increasing brand loyalty and enhancing brand equity through elevating the customer experience with the retail brands and strengthening the relationships with the customers. The conceptual framework is developed based on the theoretical analysis of existing literature on brand and blockchain technology. This thesis is conducted based on a qualitative research design to meet the purpose of the thesis. The thesis followed an abductive reasoning approach throughout the research process. A semi-structured interview was conducted for investigating and validating the developed conceptual framework and concluded with an empirically validated framework. The target population comprises both male and female from different nationalities and fall in the age group 26 to 40. The empirically validated framework of the research findings reveals that the unique characteristics of blockchain technology have enough potentiality for adding value to the retailers’ branding effort through effective advertising and loyalty programs and efficient inventory management. The research finding further conclude the utilization of blockchain technology in uplifting customer experience and strengthening retail brand-customer relationship for achieving increased brand loyalty and enhanced brand equity