Mobile Payment Transactions

Abstract

Mobile payment transactions are not fundamentally different from classical e-commerce payment transactions. Although the inherent limitations of mobile devices may render difficult the support of both the purchasing experience and the whole payment phase, their personal nature and their built-in authentication capabilities make them an attractive channel to support cardholder authentication by the payment card issuer. Such an authentication is a prerequisite for the non-repudiation of payment transactions, and therefore for a liability shift from the merchants to the issuers. Mobile devices may be used as authentication tokens within the framework of modern e-payment architectures, such as SPA/UCAF or 3-D Secure. The techniques used range from robust but rather complex and costly systems, e.g. based on symmetric or asymmetric cryptography and SIM or WIM cards, to less sophisticated, but easy to deploy, means, e.g., the use of passwords with SMS messages.