Every so often I set an exam question to which I actually want to know the answer. A few years back, when the National Lottery franchise was up for tender, I asked students how to cheat at the lottery; the answers were both entertaining and instructive. Having a lot of bright youngsters think about a problem under stress for half an hour gives you rapid, massively-parallel requirements engineering.

This year I asked about phishing: here’s the question. When I set it in February, an important question for the banks was whether to combat phishing with two-factor authentication (give customers a handheld password calculator, as Coutts does) or two-channel authentication (send them an SMS when they make a sensitive transaction, saying for example “if you really meant to send $4000 to Latvia, please enter the code 4715 in your browser now”).

At least two large UK banks are planning to go two-factor – despite eight-figure costs, the ease of real-time man-in-the-middle attacks, and other problems described here and here. Some banks have thought of two-channel but took fright at the prospect that customers might find it hard to use and deluge their call centres. So I set phishing as an exam question, inviting candidates to select two protection mechanisms from a list of four.

The overwhelming majority of the 34 students who answered the question chose two-channel as one of their mechanisms. I’ve recently become convinced this is the right answer, because of feedback from early adopter banks overseas who have experienced no significant usability problems. It was interesting to have this insight confirmed by the “wisdom of crowds”; I’d only got the feedback in the last month or so, and had not told the students.

Ross

PS: there’s always some obiter dictum that gives an insight into youth psychology. Here it was the candidate who said the bank should use SSL client certificates plus SMS notification, as that gives you three-factor authentication: something you know (your password), something you have (your SSL cert) and something you are (your phone). So now we know 🙂