Digital Payments Lab

Introduction

The Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India have been making combined efforts to promote financial inclusion as one of the important national objectives of the country. Currently, payment systems have evolved from simple cash or credit card transactions to advanced technological payment solutions with the penetration of Internet and increased use of mobile devices. Despite this, several remote places in India are still lacking basic financial infrastructure and due to this, they are losing out on the benefits that the government has laid out for them and are unable to exercise full independence over their finances.

Objectives

The objectives can be categorized as online and offline based payment solutions

  • Developing last mile payment solutions using advanced hardware modules for long-range communication in a secure way.
  • Designing mechanisms for enabling offline transactions for remote locations using space, air and ground infrastructure.
  • Cryptographic protocols for facilitating decentralised payment solutions secure, and immutable transactions in a P2P environment.

Proposed Activities

  • The Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), a statutory body of the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, has awarded the Institute a research project titled “A Secure Offline m-Payment System using Certificateless Key Agreement Mechanism for Faster Access and Handover Authentication in Space Information Networks” under the Start-up Research Grant. The primary goal of the project is to enable a secure mobile payment for rural population using the backbone support of the space information network (SIN). The project focuses on designing mechanism to enable faster communication between ground station and satellite to carry out the transactions swiftly in such remote locations.
  • The Institute has been awarded a research project entitled Design and Development of a Unified Blockchain Framework for offering National Blockchain Service and creation of a Blockchain Ecosystem ” (to be carried out in collaboration with C-DAC (Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune), IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, NIC, and SETS), sponsored by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. The primary focus is on designing and developing mechanisms to enhance confidentiality, authenticity, and data privacy using Blockchain Technology.
  • Efforts are being made in testing and setting up a LoRaWAN based secured micro-transactions for resolving the last mile connectivity through a terrestrial network. This technology is capable of minimising the infrastructure, operational costs and bringing in secure lightweight communication for rural connectivity.

Coordinator

Dr. Susmita Mandal

Assistant Professor

Research Fellows

Sravan S S

Guide: Dr. Susmita Mandal

Topic: Certificateless Key Exchange in IoT Enabled Wireless Communication

Bhavika

Guide: Dr. Susmita Mandal

Topic: Privacy Preserving For Secure Multimedia Data Communication

Research