Information Security for Marketplace Users: The Importance of Two Factor Authentication

With the rapid developments and improvements of technology, more and more businesses have seen the potential growth they can achieve by migrating their traditional offline stores into an online store utilizing the technology of mobile apps and website that connects them to their customer through the internet. The reason for this to happen is due to the huge cut of operational cost, followed by an increase in efficiency of their business processes that gives business owners more competitive advantages to survive the market. (Combe, 2012) 

As the trend of shopping online keeps growing bigger and bigger, businesses have moved their traditional offline stores to an online platform in various internet marketplaces. The top two marketplaces in Indonesia being Tokopedia and Shopee. These marketplaces act as the third party that connects sellers and customers in one platform, which is their application, with additional advantage that gives them a “guaranteed safe” transaction. Of course, although these marketplaces have given them a guaranteed and safe transaction, there are always people evil-minded people full of bad intentions trying to find ways to abuse these trends of online shopping. These ill-intentioned attackers usually attack their victims by sending spam or fraud messages. Some very skilled attackers might even get the information of a customer by penetrating through the victim’s firewalls. When such thing happen, the attacker would have the access to victim’s personal information, and even passwords to her accounts. (Fisler, et al., 2018) 

With the help of the advanced technology, more and more techniques and methods are developed to prevent these attacks to happen to more people. One of the most popular ways is to never click on random ads, as there might be virus code secretly installed. As smartphone users, we need to be smart with what we do, what we install and what we click on our phones. (Godbole, 2018). Just like the internet in general, online marketplaces too have many frauds and attacks that are invented to attack victims, which usually are the marketplace users. One of the solutions that marketplaces have implemented in their applications is using two factor authentications. By using two factor authentications, when an attacker succeeded in logging in to the victim’s account, he will not be able to check out or make a transaction without knowing the other password or biometric data used to check out. This two factor authentication acts as an additional security for the customers (Jin, Ling, & Goh, 2004). 

This being said, this research paper is done to further find out whether or not two factor authentications in online marketplaces is important, especially in making both parties, the sellers and buyers of the marketplace, feel that this marketplace is a safe place for me to shop without getting any frauds. The hypotheses that the writer have came up with is that having the two-factor authentication implemented is a good strategy in making all their users feel safe about making transactions. 

According to Niranjanamurthy and Chahar, the major issues that all parts of the information system security facing is privacy and security. E-commerce being part of the information system, of course is not an exception to facing this issue. This problem is also the reason why some people are still very cautious and reluctant into engaging their life with the use of e-commerce. These days, the increase of awareness surrounding frauds and e-commerce risks have helped a lot of e-commerce users in being more careful with whatever they do on the internet. E-commerce owners also come up with several methods in reducing the risk of getting attacks by implementing One-Time Passwords (OTP) code, two factor authentications, and informing the users about the used methods of attacks that are often used by these attackers to their users along with the ways they can avoid getting attacked. 

In this paper, we are going to focus on the security regarding the two-factor authentication. There are some varying opinions and studies about the functions of two-factor authentication. Schneier have mentioned that two-factor authentication does not offer any kind of extra security to the privacy or account theft for the users of e-commerce sites. This is followed by what Karapanos, Marforio, Soriente, and Capkun mentioned about how users prefer not to use password-based two-factor authentication due to the extra step they have to do. However, it was then followed by their studies that show how other methods of two-factor authentication is useful for an extra layer of security and offers users an ease in using this two-factor authentication, more specifically being sound and biometric authentications. 

To further support the hypothesis that have been made by the writer on the first chapter, the writer also found several writings that support the fact that internet security is one of the main reasons why people are reluctant to change their old way of shopping to the newest trend of online shopping. Marchany and Tront mentioned that bad security is one of the reasons why businesses might lose their internet clients, as once the clients lose trust in online shopping, they will choose to the traditional on-site shopping. This being said, more and more online marketplaces are making all their users set up the two factor authentication on their marketplace applications. 

References 

Combe, C. (2012). Introduction to e-Business. Routledge. 

Fisler, A., Breidthardt, T., Schmidlin, N., Hopfer, H., Dickenmann, M., König, K., & Hirt-Minkowski. (2018). Bile Cast Nephropathy: The unknown dangers of online shopping. Case Rep Nephrol Dial 2018, 8(2), 98-102. doi:10.1159/000489771 

Godbole, A. (2018). Cyber Security And Online Earning: Ethical Hacking. Mauritius: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing. 

Jin, A. T., Ling, D. N., & Goh, A. (2004). Biohashing: two factor authentication featuring fingerprint data and tokenised random number. Pattern Recognition, 37(11), 2245-2255. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2004.04.011 

Karapanos, N., Marforio, C., Soriente, C., & Capkun, S. (2015). Sound-Proof: Usable Two-Factor Authentication Based on Ambient Sound. Zurich: ETH Zurich. 

Marchany, R. C., & Tront, J. G. (2002). E-commerce security issues. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2500-2508). Big Island: IEEE. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2002.994190 

Niranjanamurthy, M., & DR. Chahar, D. (2013). The study of E-Commerce Security Issues and. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering, 2(7), 2885-2895. 

Schneier, B. (2005). Two-factor authentication: too little, too late. Communications of the ACM, 48(4), 136. doi:10.1145/1053291.1053327