Survey of Strong Authentication Approaches for Mobile Proximity and Remote Wallet Applications - Challenges and Evolution

Wallet may be described as container application used for configuring, accessing and analysing data from underlying payment application(s). There are two dominant types of digital wallet applications, proximity wallet and remote wallet. In the payment industry, one often hears about authentication approach for proximity or remote wallets or the underlying payment applications separately, but there is no such approach, as per our knowledge, for combined wallet, the holder application. While Secure Element (SE) controlled by the mobile network operator (i.e., SIM card) may ensure strong authentication, it introduces strong dependencies among business partners in payments and hence is not getting fraction. Embedded SE in the form of trusted execution environment [3, 4, 5] or trusted computing [24] may address this issue in future. But such devices tend to be a bit expensive and are not abundant in the market. Meanwhile, for many years, context based authentication involving device fingerprinting and other contextual information for conditional multi-factor authentication, would prevail and would remain as the most dominant and strong authentication mechanism for mobile devices from various vendors in different capability and price ranges. EMVCo payment token standard published in 2014 tries to address security of wallet based payment in a general way. The authors believe that it is quite likely that EMVCo payment token implementations would evolve in course of time in such a way that token service providers would start insisting on device fingerprinting as strong means of authentication before issuing one-time-use payment token. This paper talks about challenges of existing authentication mechanisms used in payment and wallet applications, and their evolution

Review of Considerations for Mobile Device based Secure Access to Financial Services and Risk Handling Strategy for CIOs, CISOs and CTOs

The information technology and security stakeholders like CIOs, CISOs and CTOs in financial services organization are often asked to identify the risks with mobile computing channel for financial services that they support. They are also asked to come up with approaches for handling risks, define risk acceptance level and mitigate them. This requires them to articulate strategy for supporting a huge variety of mobile devices from various vendors with different operating systems and hardware platforms and at the same time stay within the accepted risk level. These articulations should be captured in information security policy document or other suitable document of financial services organization like banks, payment service provider, etc. While risks and mitigation approaches are available from multiple sources, the senior stakeholders may find it challenging to articulate the issues in a comprehensive manner for sharing with business owners and other technology stakeholders. This paper reviews the current research that addresses the issues mentioned above and articulates a strategy that the senior stakeholders may use in their organization. It is assumed that this type of comprehensive strategy guide for senior stakeholders is not readily available and CIOs, CISOs and CTOs would find this paper to be very useful