For our upcoming class, Saurabh Panjwani will be giving a talk on "Security issues in branchless banking". Please read the paper linked below and come prepared for some awesome discussions!

Abstract:
Even with the increasing variety and sophistication of financial tools in today's world, billions of people in developing countries remain without access to a basic bank account. Recent efforts under the hood of "branchless banking" are beginning to address this gap, by combining existing mobile phone infrastructures and human agent networks in novel ways to enable such people to access formal banking. But such efforts also face new technical challenges: they must provide basic security guarantees to users, while satisfying some of the unique constraints of the developing world, like the continuing usage of low-end phones and limited literacy of the target users.

In this talk, I will present some of my work on solving these challenges, specifically around the design of authentication solutions for branchless banking systems. Our solutions address two key security objectives -- authenticating users to the system and ensuring integrity of bank-originating messages -- and they are designed to work with low-end phones and usable by low-literate users. One of the solutions has been deployed by a leading financial service provider in India and others are planned for deployment

Paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2442886&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=247429924&CFTOKEN=39976504