Rethinking Mobile Money Security for Developing Regions

Throughout the developing world, countless people live without access to basic financial services, and physical banking infrastructure is often inaccessible. These constraints have led to the rise of mobile money, or branchless banking, systems that offer financial services to people who may not have access to conventional banks. Despite their utility, these services do not always integrate strong computer security principles into their designs. In this work, we explicitly delineate security and functionality goals for these systems, and we explore new directions for secure branchless banking towards achieving these goals in the context of unique developing world challenges. We introduce Braavos, a mobile money system that meets these goals by combining existing primitives in novel ways (namely cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, secure hardware, and data-over-audio communication). In addition to securely providing common branchless banking functionality, our approach enables new functionality such as secure offline transactions. We ground our exploration in a concrete architecture and prototype implementation.