Mobile Payment Security to Get Huge Boost from Oxcept

With horror stories like Target’s credit card security breach to new cyptocurrency on the block Dogecoin’s Christmas hacking, it seems security in the payment industry is going to be on everyone’s minds going into 2014. And, thanks to the soon to be mobile payment company Oxcept, it seems mobile payments might be able to take advantage of this.

As reported by Wired, Oxford Professor Bill Roscoe has created military defense grade security software for communicating and sharing information between devices known as Oxcept.

With a million dollars in funding from the US Navy, Roscoe and his team have been working on what they call “Spontaneous Security” for the past ten years. Initially thought up as a means for soldiers, aid workers, and government officials to be able to quickly and securely communicate with one another in a crisis or disaster, Roscoe’s Oxcept software could be great for mobile payment security and the mobile payments industry as a whole.

By using “contextual authentication” (things like your GPS location, or face–to-face verification) users can punch a unique four digit code into their devices (smartphones) and, as Wired puts it, set up a secure channel of communication with [another person] that ‘piggybacks on top of an unsecure network like the Wi-Fi in a café or the internet itself.’”

With almost a decade of work being put into the software, it seems very fortunate that Oxcept is coming to fruition while security is such a hot topic within the payments world. And while there is no release date for Oxcept at the moment, the added security it could provide consumers may cause a significant rise in mobile payment adoption in the near future.