Practical security for rural internet kiosks
Sumair Ur Rahman, Urs Hengartner, Usman Idris Ismail, Srinivasan Keshav · 2008
Rural Internet kiosks typically provide weak security guarantees and therefore cannot support secure web access or transaction-oriented applications such as banking and bill payment. We present a practical, unobtrusive and easy-to-use security architecture for rural Internet kiosks that uses a combination of physical and cryptographic mechanisms to protect user data and kiosk infrastructure. Our contributions include (a) a detailed threat analysis of rural Internet kiosks, b) a security architecture for rural Internet kiosks that does not require any specialized hardware features in kiosks, and (c) an application-independent and backward-compatible security API for securely sending and receiving data between kiosks and the Internet that can operate over disconnection-tolerant links.