Electronic Payment Systems

Electronic Payment Systems

Electronic payment systems are turning up everywhere we look and many major businesses and credit card companies are jumping on the bandwagon. Nobody wants to be left behind when finding a way to pay for items using your mobile phone. It helps customers by making speeding up payments and allowing them to no longer need to carry cash or credit cards with them physically; all they need is there mobile phone. The question is whether or not they are safe, and if they really save us time or not. They definitely save businesses money on not paying credit card fees for every time a customer uses one, but at what risk?

The biggest hype about the new electronic payment systems is the electronic wallet, or e-wallet. This all started with the ISIS Mobile Wallet and the Google NFC Wallet, they are some of the largest initiators out there. These electronic wallets store data from bank cards and loyalty cards together with information about deliveries. There is plenty of talk about how the development of the e-wallet is only just beginning. In the future it will probably be able to store other personal data, as in ID cards, medical information and health cards.

Security and the protection of peoples' private lives and personal data are the main issue at hand. Many people are reluctant to enter all of their credit card information and bank accounts to a website or app on their phone. What happens if they lose their phone, or somebody hacks into their phone? It seems like they would simply be at the mercy of losing everything.

Google Wallet has been one of the primary contenders in this new phenomenon. All you have to do is enter your PIN number, wave the phone at the reader and the transaction would be complete. According to Google, if the phone was ever stolen, the thief would still require your PIN number to make purchases, and Google Wallet locks up after entering five incorrect PIN numbers. Unfortunately in February 2012, a researcher named Joshua Rubin revealed a quick and simple technique to extract the Google Wallet PIN number from a rooted phone. He realized that there are only 10,000 possible values for a four digit PIN number and quickly came up with a program that easily checked all 10,000 values against the stored PIN number, which in turn revealed the correct PIN number. While Google is still working out all of the details to fix this problem, there are a few recommendations on how to still use the program without getting your information stolen. Rubin recommends that you enable a lock screen option, disable any USB debugging, enable full disk encryption, and keep your Android device fully up to date.

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