TY - GEN
T1 - Alphacodes
T2 - 7th ACM Symposium on Computing for Development, ACM DEV 2016
AU - Sharma, Ashlesh
AU - Chandrasekaran, Varun
AU - Amjad, Fareeha
AU - Shasha, Dennis
AU - Subramanian, Lakshminarayanan
N1 - Funding Information:
*This research was supported by grants from Department of Biotechnology, University Grant Commission and Indian Council of Medical Research, Government of India. PS is supported by a grant from Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.
PY - 2016/11/18
Y1 - 2016/11/18
N2 - Many banking and commerce payment systems in developing regions require users to share private or sensitive information in clear-text with untrusted providers, exposing them to different forms of man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we introduce Alphacodes, a new paradigm that enables users to secure transactions with untrusted parties using the notion of human-computable visual puzzles. We describe how Alphacodes can be applied in different use cases and also explain two simple applications that we have built using this framework. We motivate our solution using security vulnerabilities in existing systems, and show how our protocol overcomes them. We demonstrate the ease of use of Alphacodes with minimal training using two simple crowdsourcing studies. Using another simple real world user study involving 10 users who speak Kannada (a regional Indian language), we show that the Alphacodes paradigm can be easily extended to languages beyond English.
AB - Many banking and commerce payment systems in developing regions require users to share private or sensitive information in clear-text with untrusted providers, exposing them to different forms of man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we introduce Alphacodes, a new paradigm that enables users to secure transactions with untrusted parties using the notion of human-computable visual puzzles. We describe how Alphacodes can be applied in different use cases and also explain two simple applications that we have built using this framework. We motivate our solution using security vulnerabilities in existing systems, and show how our protocol overcomes them. We demonstrate the ease of use of Alphacodes with minimal training using two simple crowdsourcing studies. Using another simple real world user study involving 10 users who speak Kannada (a regional Indian language), we show that the Alphacodes paradigm can be easily extended to languages beyond English.
KW - Alphacodes
KW - Branchless Banking
KW - Human Computation Puzzles
KW - Usable Security
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85013194960&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85013194960&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3001913.3001924
DO - 10.1145/3001913.3001924
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85013194960
T3 - Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, ACM DEV-7 2016
BT - Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, ACM DEV-7 2016
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 18 November 2016 through 20 November 2016
ER -