London University to the rescue of mobile banking security!







City University London received a three year grant from the Government’s UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) to "secure the future of mobile banking". Read more here. According to the report, the researchers are under the impression that most banking systems requires a separate (second) SIM card in order to produce a secure session. This means that subscribers have to swap their SIM's in order to do banking. (I am quoting from the article on the Universities website - I am serious!). The article describes how the researchers are busy pioneering "a new form of security software, which generates a personal code or “crypto key” to each user via their existing SIM card."

I suppose they could use the grant money to catch a flight to Africa (the majority of countries in Africa) to come and see how this kind of solution actually works in production, where millions of people do banking with one SIM.... and where every transaction are encrypted with a personal crypto key.