E-Banking Security Study—10 Years Later

Abstract

ICT security in the banking area is going through rapid changes. It is ten years since we covered the state of e-banking security, and both authentication schemes and legislation has evolved. With the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) for European Union coming into force, we believe it is a good time to update our findings. PSD2 brings new requirements for multi-factor authentication, thus it is necessary to revise compliance of currently used schemes. This work’s main contribution is an overview of current authentication methods, their properties with respect to international standards, and their resistance against attacks. We further discuss the multi-factor authentication schemes composed of those methods and their compliance with the PSD2 requirements. In order to present the overview, we introduced the e-banking attacks taxonomy, which is compatible with authenticator threats from NIST Digital Identity Guidelines but has an increased level of detail with respect to the e-banking area. The available sources in this area are usually either very broad, targeted on the business executive, or focus on one particular issue or attack in greater detail. We believe our article can bridge such diverse sources by providing a comprehensive and complex tool to help with orientation in the area.

Keywords

• Online banking
• PSD2
• authentication
• multi-factor
• cybersecurity
• secure hardware