SMART ELECTRONIC PAYMENT DEVICES: AN OPPORTUNITY OR A RISK FOR TRANSACTION SECURITY?

Technological evolution has encouraged migrating more and more towards the smart tech in every domain of human life activity, from being able to order a cab and watch the route followed on our smartphones to using our smartwatches to pay for groceries and even in niche domains like e-readers (electronic readers) everything is becoming smart, instead of having single purpose dedicated devices now any of our devices can fulfill most roles all others can. The electronic payment sector is one that has also seen a migration towards the smart, specifically, point of sale devices (POS) either fixed or mobile are more and more moving towards being either full computers running a general use operating system like Windows or Linux or smartphone/tablet style devices running Android. While the migration has advantages such as making it harder for an onlooker to steal credit/debit card PINs by randomizing the numeric keyboard there are serious security concerns associated with using general tech in processing e-transactions considering operating system or hardware vulnerabilities can be detected at any point and are easier to identify by malicious actors than on the classic POS devices which offered security through obscurity. This paper proposes an analysis of a mobile POS device (ZJIANG ZJ-6000) to gain a better understanding of the security situation of smart electronic payment devices.