Securing KioskNet: A Systems Approach

Internet kiosks typically provide weak security guarantees and therefore cannot support secure web access or transactionoriented applications such as banking and bill payment. We present the design and implementation of a practical, unobtrusive and easy-to-use security architecture for KioskNet, a system for low-cost rural Internet kiosks. Our system uses a combination of physical and cryptographic mechanisms to protect user data and infrastructure nodes despite frequent disconnections, untrusted administrators, and large end-to-end delays. Our contributions include (a) a detailed threat analysis of rural kiosks, (b) the first comprehensive security architecture for rural kiosk security, (c) a simple and easy to use API for securely sending and receiving files over KioskNet (d) protection for user data both on the file system and in transit, and (e) a usable public key infrastructure (PKI). Performance measurements show that our system imposes 100ms of delay during user login at kiosks and an additional 560ms and 750ms per megabyte of data sent and received by a kiosk user, respectively, suggesting that the system is both efficient and usable.