SEMOPS+SIP+ECC: Enhanced secure mobile payments

Mobile payments and mobile banking are growing trends among smart phone users. However, many attempts have failed to push such trends further. One of the main reasons is that most current mobile payment systems encompass a high number of cryptographic operations which consume a high percentage of the mobile handset resources. This paper proposes a light secure mobile payment protocol by enhancing a working payment system SEMOPS (Secure Mobile Payment Service) to be integrated with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem). The enhanced protocol reduces the operational load due to cryptographic operations, while allowing the introduction of higher security levels hence is suitable for micro, macro, and higher payments amounts. The proposed protocol´s high scalability is attributed to using SIP for data exchange. Qualitative analysis demonstrates the viability of main security services including privacy, authentication, and integrity. In addition, quantitative analysis of required cryptographic operations demonstrates the positive effect on reduced energy consumption. A prototype for the main protocol´s functions has been implemented. Performance evaluation results show that the enhancements make SEMOPS faster by reducing total number of cryptographic operations; thus it allows reaching higher security levels without affecting operation performance.