SafePass: Authentication under duress for ATM transactions

Abstract

With the proliferation of ATM installations throughout the world, billions of transactions are being conducted annually. This easy, location independent and 24 hours access to money has also given birth to ATM related thefts and this situation is more pronounced in developing countries with poor law and order situation. Panic passwords can be used as an effective mean to signal stress during authentication. Panic password scheme provides a safe way to avoid a forced authentication or signal stress when authentication is a result of coercive action. In this paper, we introduce SafePass, a new panic password scheme that can be easily deployed over the ATM infrastructure. In SafePass, special attention is given from the usability perspective as it would be extremely valuable for large scale proliferation.