Your Money or Your Life---Modeling and Analyzing the Security of Electronic Payment in the UC Framework

EMV, also known as Chip and PIN, is the world-wide standard for card-based electronic payment. Its security wavers: over the past years, researchers have demonstrated various practical attacks, ranging from using stolen cards by disabling PIN verification to cloning cards by pre-computing transaction data. Most of these attacks rely on violating certain unjustified and not explicitly stated core assumptions upon which EMV is built, namely that the input device (e.g. the ATM) is trusted and all communication channels are non-interceptable. In addition, EMV lacks a comprehensive formal description of its security. In this work we give a formal model for the security of electronic payment protocols in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. A particular challenge for electronic payment is that one participant of a transaction is a human who cannot perform cryptographic operations. Our goal is twofold. First, we want to enable a transition from the iterative engineering of such protocols to using cryptographic security models to argue about a protocol’s security. Second, we establish a more realistic adversarial model for payment protocols in the presence of insecure devices and channels. We prove a set of necessary requirements for secure electronic payment with regards to our model. We then discuss the security of current payment protocols based on these results and find that most are insecure or require unrealistically strong assumptions. Finally, we give a simple payment protocol inspired by chipTAN and photoTAN and prove its security. Our model captures the security properties of electronic payment protocols with human interaction. We show how to use this to reason about necessary requirements for secure electronic payment and how to develop a protocol based on the resulting guidelines. We hope that this will facilitate the development of new protocols with well-understood security properties

e-Health for Rural Areas in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Sebokeng Experience

We report the experience gained in an e-Health project in the Gauteng province, in South Africa. A Proof-of-Concept of the project has been already installed in 3 clinics in the Sebokeng township. The project is now going to be applied to 300 clinics in the whole province. This extension of the Proof-of-Concept can however give rise to security aws because of the inclusion of rural areas with unreliable Internet connection. We address this problem and propose a safe solution

An optimistic fair e-commerce protocol for large e-goods

Suppose two entities that do not trust each other want to exchange some arbitrary data over a public channel. A fair exchange protocol ensures that both parties get what they want or neither gets anything. In this paper, a fair e-commerce protocol for large e-goods is proposed and implemented. The proposed protocol provides a method for the fair exchange of e-money for e-products, and a method for verifying the contents of the exchanged items. The protocol is optimistic and efficient such that when none of the parties tries to cheat, only three messages are sufficient. In case of disputes, three more messages are needed. Furthermore, the customer remains anonymous after the transaction; thus, no information about the customers' shopping habits can be gathered through the protocol. The implementation results show that the protocol is efficient and secure and that only a small number of cryptographic operations is sufficient