Visual Mutual Authentication- an approach to secure online banking

Today, most applications are only as secure as their underlying system. Since the design and technology of malware has improved steadily, their dectection is a difficult problem. As a result it is nearly impossible to be sure whether a computer, that is connected to the internet, can be considered trustworthy and secure or not. The question is, how to handle applications, that require a high level of security, such as online banking. In consequence we are interested in a solution, that allows us to establish a secure and trusted communication, although the underlying system is untrusted. In this paper we present an approach, that is based on Visual Cryptography. In [NaorS94] Shamir and Naor presented the concept of Visual Cryptography, that handles the plaintext to be encrypted as a graphic, that is processed pixel by pixel and thus implies interesting characteristics concerning security and fault tolerance. In [NaorP97] Naor and Pinkas demonstrated how to use Visual Cryptography for the authentication of one party without trusting the underlying system. Based on this, we develope a scheme for mutual visual authentication of a user and a server, that allows us to establish a trusted channel between the two parties, and can be used for secure communication. We describe the Visual Mutual Authentication- Scheme and demonstrate its application a