Rural Internet kiosks typically provide weak security guarantees and
therefore cannot support secure web access or transaction-oriented
applications such as banking and bill payment. We present a practical,
unobtrusive and easy-to-use security architecture for rural Internet
kiosks that uses a combination of physical and cryptographic
mechanisms to protect user data and kiosk infrastructure. Our
contributions include (a) a detailed threat analysis of rural Internet
kiosks, (b) a security architecture for rural Internet kiosks that
does not require any specialized hardware features in kiosks, and (c)
an application-independent and backward-compatible security API for
securely sending and receiving data between kiosks and the Internet
that can operate over disconnection-tolerant links.