wallet/docs/electronic_wallet.html

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<h1>Electronic Wallet</h1>
<p>We are moving towards a system where people use a cell phone as their
wallet, or a smart card with screen and some buttons.</p>
<p>A cell phone is used two handed, one hand holding it, one hand pressing the
buttons. A dedicated wallet would be used one handed, held by ones palms and
fingers, with a thumb click accepting or rejecting a transaction. The dedicated
wallet would be able to talk to any other wallet, or to ones cell phone, or
indeed any cell phone, if touched to it, or nearly touched to it.</p>
<p>The wallet communicates primarily by near field communications, the wireless
equivalent of whispering in someones ear. Nearfield is a communication method
that guarantees that the entities communicating are very close together with
radio you want the greatest possible range, but nearfield is for those
situations where for security reasons you want the least possible range.
Nearfield is radio with the antenna twisted to pick up the quadrupole field and
ignore the dipole field. Ideally, an near field communication chip should only
be able to talk to something that is almost touching, and it should be
impossible to eavesdrop from more than a foot or so away. </p>
<p>This device should function wallet, as car key, atm card, credit card,
computer login device, and employee door opening device. It enables you to
login to websites.</p>
<p>To buy groceries, you would touch the device to the cash register, the cash
register would show it was asking for a certain sum of money, the device would
show it was being asked for that sum and vibrate or beep, you would thumb
acceptance, and money would be transferred to the cash register, and a receipt
transferred to the wallet.</p>
<p>Money would be represented to the user as if it was a tangible object that
could reside in the wallet, in the cell phone, or in an account. Ones cell
phone can transfer money between these places, with the transfer taking a short
but finite time money leaves one account before it arrives in another
account.</p>
<p>The device would also handle non monetary receipts you put your coat in
storage, you get a receipt that enables you to collect it back again.</p>
<p>Of course if the wallet is thumb controlled, it is as easily stolen as a
real wallet, or real keys. A cell phone functioning as a wallet can be made
resistant to theft.</p>
<p>A *spoken* passphrase is both something I know, and something I am. Of
course someone could unobtrusively record it but he would need to record it
*and* steal the phone. Easy to do one, easy to do the other, not quite so easy
to do both.</p>
<p>Further, a spoken passphrase can comply with the principle of Not One Click
for Security. You set up the user interface so that speaking the passphrase is
used in place of clicking OK. </p>
<p>The way the that the user interface should work, is that the smartphone has
speech recognition and NFC. To authorize payment, or login, or whatever, you
bring the smartphone close to the NFC device, for example the cash register.
When the NFC handshake is complete, the phone makes a beep and displays the
proposed transaction, and then you speak the magic passphrase for that
transaction.</p>
<p style="background-color : #ccffcc; font-size:80%">These documents are
licensed under the <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License</a></p>
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