Will the ubiquitous handset become the ID of the future?
From the bag phone, to the brick phone to the flip phone, the mobile phone has evolved quite a bit in the last 25 years. The overarching trend had been toward smaller and smaller devices, but this preoccupation with size seems to have reached a plateau. The focus now is squarely on adding capabilities.
For many using the mobile device as a phone has become secondary to e-mail and Internet-enabled applications. Individuals will walk out of their homes without keys or a wallet, but seldom will they leave without their phone.
“The mobile phone is closely bound to you,” says Steve Dispenza, CTO and co-founder at PhoneFactor. “At the end of the day the phone is a good solution to a difficult problem … because of the variety of attacks, you can’t trust the Internet.”
There are 2348 words in the rest of this article …
Library Access Required
Library subscribers have access to the full archives of more than 10,000 original news items and feature articles published by AVISIAN’s suite of ID technology publications (ContactlessNews.com, CR80News.com, DigitalIDNews.com, FIPS201.com, NFCNews.com, RFIDNews.org, SecureIDNews.com, and ThirdFactor.com).
For just $49, you receive unlimited password-protected access to content on all of AVISIAN’s sites for an entire year. Your subscription helps fund the continued creation of independent, insightful content. Find out more.
Sign in as a Subscriber
If you are already a subscriber, you may sign in now. Enter your Email Address and Password and click Sign In.
If you have forgotten your password, enter just your Email Address, and click Send Password.
Wait a minute your expert is the CTO of RSA? Didn't RSA get hacked a while again and then said that the stolen information might potentially be used to compromise the secure IDs that they sell? Did the federal government also prove that MIGHT be used actually means that RSA clients ARE being hacked? Seriously could you not find a better expert? I don't know maybe someone from Entrust for example ... (and no I do not work for them).
As to the article, yes the majority of SIMs cannot do PKI at the moment. It is not even certain that MNOs would ever use SIMs that can (and yes those have been around for quite some time). However, the fact is that today you do not need to do the encryption on a SIM and doing it on the phone itself is much cheaper and faster because you use a higher lever programming language. Yet your phone will not replace your ID. The easiest way to explain this is you don't actually own your government-issued ID and your phone is yours to do as you please with it.
George,
This article was reported and written well before the RSA hack was announced back in March and has been in print for a couple of months. For us to take them out at this point would have been revisionist history and his comments still have value.