[Above: The Team Behind CCSK (clockwise from left): Phone Myint, Mike (Supervisor), Justin Ng Chin Fong, Teong Wei Shyang and Cho Ji Kiat.]

Maintaining your online banking security without the hassle of carrying around portable dongles may soon be possible, with the help of a group of Temasek Polytechnic school students.

The trio from the Diploma in Cyber and Digital Security of Temasek Polytechnic’s Informatics and IT School - Cho Ji Kiat, Justin Ng Chin Fong and Teong Wei Shyang - came up with a clever solution to tackle online password thefts and boost internet security for users.

The system, named Colour Coded Security Keys (CCSK), generates random numbers in colour and sends an image file to the registered user's e-mail account.

The image is embedded with lines so that it cannot be recognized by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs, which translates images into human readable text.

Users will be asked to enter specific letters only in a specific colour, for utmost security. The system is flexible enough to support colour-blind users; in which case, it will only generate the image in grey, white and black.

The key benefits of CCSK are the elimination of the need to provide one-time-passwords via SMS and security dongles, reducing operating costs for banks.

The students' supervisor, Mr Phone Myint, said: “The idea is simple; to give the users ease of access as well as providing necessary security measures to validate customers as the same way as one-time-passwords. Banks can use this as a backup or to complement their existing systems.

"There are unlimited ways to incorporate CCSK into things like online transactions as well.”

The students' project was one of 41 projects exhibited at the Temasek Informatics and IT School’s final-year project show where projects by graduating students from six of the School’s diplomas were featured.