Smartphone payment via flashlight: Utilizing the built-in flashlight of smartphones as replacement for magnetic cards

摘要

Since society nowadays depends deeply on technology, smartphones, smart payments and credit cards in most daily tasks, it is a necessity to provide a secure, easy and inexpensive way of communication between the smartphone and automatic teller machines (ATM) or card readers. In this paper, we have practically implemented a system which replaces the magnetic card with the built-in flashlight of an Android smartphone to transmit the data stored on the magnetic strip to a small, inexpensive module on the ATM. The feasibility of the system is tested using two different common types of smartphone flashlights: the high brightness, low speed Xenon flashlight and the comparably low brightness but faster light emitting diode (LED) flashlight.