Securing Mobile Payment Protocol based on EMV Standard

This is an era of communication technology. This era has faced a lot of innovation in technology sector. Mobile phones were once used for calling or text messaging only, now slowly becoming competitor of computers. The rapid development of hardware, software and operating system of smartphones made it possible to do multiple tasks through the phones. Nowadays, smart phones have powerful operating systems which provide wide range of applications. Smart phones can be interfaced with external hardware also. The payment industry is about to see a drastic change because of these features. People can now pay through their smartphones; they can use payment cards to pay through it etc. But financial transaction is a very sensitive service and security is very crucial here. For financial services, the major security services such as confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, authorization and non-repudiation must be ensured. There are two major types of payment cards, magnetic-stripe based cards and chip based cards. Chip based card provides better security. Magnetic stripe based cards being static, is easy to counterfeit. But the fact that these magnetic stripe cards are still used in many countries, it is necessary to provide a security solution in order to protect customers from treachery. In this thesis, it has been investigated how to secure the mobile payment based on EMV standard. EMV is a chip based payment card. It has strong security features which made skimming or tampering it very hard. But, Magstripe based payments still remained insecure. This thesis paper aims to secure the transaction when paid with magnetic stripe based cards. Several measures have been taken to ensure that major security services are met. In addition, a prototype was developed and tested to demonstrate the practicality of the designed solution. The research results of this paper show that by transacting through the secured mobile payment protocol, customers can avail payment service more securely than traditional magnetic striped card based payments