Biometric security mechanism in Mobile paymentts

M-commerce (mobile commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services through wireless handheld devices such as cellular telephone and personal digital assistants PDA. Today many people never leave home without their mobile phones. As content delivery over wireless devices becomes faster and scalable, there is wide speculation that m-commerce will surpass wireline e-commerce. M-commerce, in the context, provides a lot of services like Mobile ticketing, Mobile banking, Mobile location based services, Mobile auctions, Mobile purchasing and so on. This represents an incredible opportunity to enable mobile devices, as universal devices for mobile commerce applications. At the same time security is the biggest threat in such applications, particularly while paying through the use of Credit card, etc. The dangers of mobile commerce are the same as computer based e-commerce wireless hacks, identity theft and phishing. Phones, however, carry unique security risks like theft, cell Cloning, eavesdrop and man in middle attacks. To secure mobile commerce during payment there are some techniques in vogue like pass codes, pin number of card, identification of serial numbers stored in the sim, signature, etc. But still, these security mechanisms are not that effective, as it is easy to replicate for example one´s signature or get the password or pin number. So, we here propose, one more level of security mechanism that could be used viz., the finger print, as fingerprints are one that cannot be replicated.