Rabo Technical Manager Boazzi

Boazzi/Chipper

Research & Development

Telephone Banking

Worked  as a “hands-on” project manager on a research & development exercise for combining Boazzi personal Chipcard readers to be used as ‘secure logon’ devices when connecting to the Bank’s Rabofoon  Telephone Banking system.

The Boazzi Interface  was  a “prototype” enhancement to  the Rabofoon application.  It provided the facility for a user, with a Boazzi / Chipknipper,  to dial into the system and perform a Secure Logon, without having to use a telephone keypad  to enter a account number and a TIN code.  The user would only need to place a Chipcard into the Boazzi hand-held device, connected to a telephone, and enter a PIN code.   A challenge/response protocol was been specially developed, between the Boazzi device and the host system,  to allow authentication of the chipcards being used.  If a card was considered valid, and linked with one of the users banking agreements, then the logon procedure would  allow access to Rabofoon. The application would detected by which means a user had connected to the system, either Boazzi or by normal telephone input. If the Boazzi had been used, the extra facilities could be configured

The overall Rabofoon-Boazzi prototype system ran completely within a  BETEX  software environment but was distributed across many different pieces of computing and datacoms hardware.

• A Unix system, with attached modems was used to connect incoming  telephone calls  from Boazzi devices to the Tandem hosts. The Unix application converted the asynchronous Fax protocol, used by the Boazzi, to a TCP/IP session with the Tandem. A “Secure Logon” protocol was developed    for the data transfers between the Boazzi device and the Tandem host.
• Separate Betex datacom tasks were written on the Tandem to implement the Boazzi  datacom Secure Logon processing
• The new architecture and software components  were integrated into the standard telephone banking application

Performed the research & development, debugging and testing of the Betex & Datacomms  pilot software on the Tandem,  written in  C.  Performed extensive testing of the end-to-end “Secure Logon” protocol, and of the Unix application which linked the Boazzi devices to the Tandem. Documented the complete hardware and software architecture

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