Mobile Payment Non-Repudiation with Physical Context

Abstract

The adoption of mobile payment technologies is on the rise, not only in Hong Kong, but the world over. In Hong Kong alone, there are numerous operators, including credit card companies, telecom providers and even mainland payment giants. Moreover, the recent addition of Octopus Peer-to-Peer app O! ePay, is also seen as having a great potential because the existing service of contactless payment, Octopus Card, provided by Octopus is most widely adopted in Hong Kong.

Security plays a crucial role when it comes to mobile payments as it involves money and important banking credentials, including credit/debit card numbers and Card Verification Value (CVV). However, most of the existing peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payment service providers, including Tap&Go require network connection when conducting transactions for validation and processing of the transactions, which shows their reliance on a trusted third party for overlooking transactions.

In order to provide a new dimension of secure offline P2P mobile payments, we introduce PhysiPay, a secure P2P mobile payment system, in which the payer and payee could conduct a secure payment transaction through their smartphones, using physical interactions for provision of non-repudiation services, offline validation of transactions in addition to the facilitation of secure payments. In addition to security, another objective was to develop a user-friendly system, which would provide good user experience and hence, a simple and comprehensive user interface was developed, and automation of user input was also provided. An example would be adding new credit cards, for which the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to scan credit cards and retrieve the card number, provided the user with convenience.