We're not just talking about the opportunity to sell high bandwidth, 'always on' connections and the value-added services that will take advantage of this infrastructure. There's also an opportunity here to make the mobile telephone handset into an 'electronic wallet' and authentication aid, thereby facilitating all manner of e-commerce transactions.
The idea is that the telephone's smart card, supplemented by a PIN number, is a convenient way to authenticate the user – offering the potential to secure on-line transactions in a way that an ordinary PC cannot.
For the consumer, this means making purchases online more conveniently and safely than ever before. For online businesses, it means vastly increased volumes of e-commerce transactions. For the mobile communications industry, it means obtaining a slice of all those transactions, and thus making much more money out of what are essentially the same basic products and services.
IP security overlooked
Right now, mobile players are so busy working on their next generation services that they risk overlooking a danger which could negate all their endeavours: inadequate security.
One particular aspect of security has not yet had its fair share of attention, and that's the threat opened up by the convergence of mobile communications and IP. That convergence brings power, but it also brings hazards.
With convergence, we're opening up a Pandora's Box of new security problems, as many IP exploits discovered by Internet criminals over the past decade or two potentially become available for hacking mobile communications as well.
And IP hacking is easy. You don't need any specialist kit, just a PC and some software that, for the most part, is freely downloadable from the World Wide Web.
At this juncture, security may look like a cost that companies can ill-afford. Something that can't be sold. If we begin to promote handsets as electronic wallets, though, the first question is going to be: "How safe is it?" Unless they see watertight security, consumers will not buy into the idea. Security, together with convenience, is the whole point of buying a mobile telephone in the first place.
An ideal opportunity
The good news is that the mobile communications companies now have an ideal opportunity to engineer appropriate safeguards into next generation products and services prior to their launch.
This way, by the time the security hazards become clear to the public, the industry will have answers to all of them. And the really good news is that these safeguards are much easier to obtain than one might expect.
Some of the latest developments in software-based IP security mechanisms lend themselves to mobile devices as well as to conventional computing platforms in a way that earlier mechanisms never did. They also block loopholes that hackers have already found in some older IP safeguards.
By getting together with appropriate security companies, then, mobile players still have the necessary lead time to take these products and thoroughly test them before they 'go live'. Then the true benefits will out.
Source
SMT
Postscript
Toby Ben is product manager at Access Research Technologies
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