The Problems with Secure On-line Banking

A growing awareness of the commercial benefits of online banking have contributed to a sense of urgency among banks to deploy such systems. However, while security of the communications is usually well considered, most do not sufficiently address the security of the platform on which these applications run. In this paper, we outline two existing on-line banking schemes and describe how this weakness can be exploited to subvert the authentication mechanisms in these systems. The aim is to show that these types of attack are not just theoretically possible, but practical and even easy to implement. We present alternative approaches for securing the authentication of online banking applications including a new method that provides an effective compromise between security and other concerns.