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Given the rapidly evolving developments in Fintech, Insurtech, Open Banking, and Mobile Money business models in recent years, the capability for ensuring strong authentication remains the most pressing need for the protection of security and privacy of data in this sector as in many other areas. The security-integrity of insurance and financial transactions and workflows is vitally dependent on access control mechanisms to deliver strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) with operationally acceptable latency and throughput to support real-time response, particularly as demanded by the increasing online and mobile financial service models. The Critical-Chains Project was motivated by the above objectives as underpinned by the overarching commitment to accountability engineering as required by the operational logic. This must be crucially supported by real-time hardware-enabled services comprising authentication (including Distance Bounding and Prover’s Proximal Location Presence Verification), hardware security and cryptography (AUTH-as-a-Service, Hardware-Security-as-a-Service, Cryptography-as-a-Service) as delivered through the Critical-Chains main framework. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of the innovative Hardware-enabled authentication and security capabilities of the Critical-Chains framework which is successfully validated in the context of financial services, specifically the insurance claim settlement application domain, and can also be deployed in any other domains where trusted authentication and specific location-time bound prover’s presence verification is required.

This paper presents the optimal conditions for the design of a single-rod fluxgate magnetometer using Co-based amorphous magnetic wires with reduced geometrical dimensions of 100 μm in diameter. In order to enhance the performance of the current sensor (i.e. the noise level, the sensitivity, the dynamical range, the scaling factor, etc), the core materials were subjected to annealing at different annealing temperatures in a longitudinal magnetic field ranging from 0 to 0.5 T. The B–H measurements have shown that the heat treatments significantly change the magnetic parameters of the cores (the saturation field, the initial and apparent permeabilities). For instance, the initial permeability μi attains values of between 3500 and 4700 depending on the treatment conditions. These magnetic parameters were subsequently correlated with the sensor performance by using the principles of the fluxgate physics. Consequently, the enhanced fluxgate effect with improved sensing characteristics has been obtained by annealing the wire core at 250 °C (B  =  0 T). It is shown that this magnetic wire with a sensing area of 0.00785 mm2 is suitable as a sensor core for the nondestructive testing of metallic objects and the surfaces of magnetic cards. The sensor signal shows perfect linear dependence to dc or low frequency fields up to ~1 Oe. The fitting parameters R2 of 0.9998 could be achieved in a dc field interval of  −1.0 Oe and 1.0 Oe (when R2  =1.0, all points lie exactly on the curve with no scatter). Such linearity has not been seen in such a large dynamical range until now in the rod-type single-core fluxgates. It is also shown that there is no hysteresis on the V2f–Hdc graphs (the V2f is the sensor signal) even after applying fields as high as 100 Oe. Besides, the cross-field effect is almost zero due to the geometry of the long-thin wire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]