Meet us at e-Smart 2008

KerPass will make a presentation at e-Smart conference on the 18th of September 2008. We will present advanced solutions for delivering reliable software tokens on networked devices.

Defeating the “Man in the Middle”, mobile SignCode to the rescue.

Right from the inception of the KerPass system, we considered “transaction validation” to be part of our roadmap. We took some time to develop a portable digital signature system based on elliptic curve cryptography and proposed additionally to it something we call “Password signature” which is a digital signature that you can use like a password.

Will NFC emerge ?

As others we are quite interested in the possibilities opened by the near field communication interface expected to be on a fair number of european smart phones by year 2011-2012. Our interest was initially sparked by questions asking us how the KerPass mobile transaction validation solution was related to the proximity payment systems based on the NFC technologies. As of today, there is no relation in between those two solutions except that both deal with personal transaction validation. Meanwhile in Japan and other advanced Asian countries real world point of sale payment system allow to use a mobile phone as a contactless payment card , the rest of the world is engaged in lengthy field pilot trials of payment/ticketing systems based on much the same technologies. In what follows we rapidly mention what capabilities NFC add to the ubiquituous smartphone, and mention our view that point of sale transaction validation maybe tackled as efficiently leveraging what mobile phones already have.

Universal security token , pictures …

Some pictures of the coming soon mobile universal security token together with related user stories. For our fellow mobile application developers , during development we try to test on real devices as early as possible and we use for this a low end device. This allow being more efficient in adressing real world issues , as simulators are generally not matching well real device performances.
Phone display photographing is a pain , fortunatly we found a helpfull girl who knows …

First start :

As the token requires network access , we first check that the device connection has been correctly parametrized. We found good inspiration by looking to Opera mini for this. If only mobile operators were trying to help here by documenting clearly the settings for their APN on a per device basis.

Paypal , password key fob goes mainstream …

It is official for about a month that Paypal will offer to its users a password key fob , in order to protect them better against identity theft. They will distribute the one time password key fob of Verisign for this.

This will certainly help in protecting Paypal users against identity theft , as this makes password guessing extremely difficult meanwhile the user is offline , however it is not correct to report that this will solve the problem of phishing . A phisher can capture a time synchronous one time password in much the same way he can capture a standard password and reuse it for its own purpose.

One time passwords have been a milk cow for security firms like RSA security and Vasco for years. They provide a strong end user proof of identity , however some innovation is required to make them suitable for being used securely in the context of web applications. The bad idea here is to assume that if used alone passwords can be moved on the network…

Transaction validation : part 2 , ECDSA signatures

Electronic signatures as offered by public key cryptography have impressing capabilities , combine those with the ubiquituous mobile phone and a global validation service that can be accessed from anywhere and you start seing many of the problems that are plagging today online electronic transaction as solved.

What we will show today is the way we integrate the token ECDSA signature capabilities with relying external web application. We take the view that end users will continue to use the desktop browser for the years to come , so part of the problem is how to integrate the on desktop accessed web application with the mobile token.

Transaction validation : part 1 , password signatures

The current KerPass token only provide for end user authentication using OATH one time passwords. The new KerPass token (code name “universal security token”) will additionnaly provide solutions for transaction validation using two differents technologies : password signatures and ECDSA electronic signatures. In this post we will discuss how password signatures are working and what are the benefits of using them.

A few words first on what is meant by transaction validation. The idea here is to allow a end user in control of a workable token to proove that he really agree with the content of a transaction , he is supposed to have been engaged… A simple example of transaction is an online payment , how do you reinsurre your bank and/or the seller that you are really the initiator of such transaction ? It is well known that this is a problem not reliably solved in current Internet. Our new mobile token will allow the end user to give a strong proof of his approval of such transaction. Let’s see how this can be simply achieved with password signatures:

French TV has found it : sms can be spoofed …

A report made the headline of the French national news of yesterday (February 5th 2007) that it is actually possible to make a sms appear to come from a person that has not sent it. It took apparently a Belgian engineer to convince the French police that this is easy to achieve , and french mobile operators have acknowledged that this is a problem the technology has.