W-CDMA/EVDO Mobile Security presentation
On Thursday night last week I attended a small presentation about mobile content security entitled ‘W-CDMA/EVDO Mobile Security presentation’ here in Tokyo. Actually the main focus of the discussion seemed to be more about the future ‘killer aps’ ( next big thing ) for mobile phones – online gaming and push-to-talk messaging and only a small amount of time was spent discussing actual security issues.
The next big thing, according to the speaker - Greg Tarr, CEO of SecureMobile, is going to be the expansion of the mobile gaming market to bring in cross platform multi-player games – being able to join in the massive multiplayer online games that are so popular on the PC using the phone handset.
Also, the push-to-talk service seems to be very much in the hype at the moment outside of Japan and the attendees at the presentation hope that it will also be big in Japan. Push-to-talk was released on the recent 902i Docomo handsets ( D902i, F902i, N902i ) last week and allows you to connect directly in real-time to a group of friends and chat, it is a similar idea to msn and other messenger services but over voice. There was a debate about whether or not this would prove popular in Japan because the technology is quite ‘intrusive’ – also the Japanese are not as fond of ‘voice’ services as they are of say text based email systems. The scenario described concerned users on the subway – they would probably not want to be talking into their handset as it is frowned upon in the rail system.
The main points that were made regarding security were to do with future worries - hacking handsets and viruses, the biggest problem they foresee is with viruses and worms on the handset that would target other online services in DOS ( denial of service ) attacks. The audience did seem a bit skeptical about the possibilities put forward by the speaker and we learned that at the moment the biggest player in the phone handset antivirus market – McAffee has decided there is not a large enough market to make the products viable. Other drawbacks include the limited memory capacity on the handsets – virus databases would be hard to store, the phone would have to scan itself on a regular basis – battery life would be a problem here. I think, however, that the main problem is the consumer does not believe that handset viruses are a big enough worry to pay for the service just yet. Perhaps in a few years but not now.
The interesting thing worth mentioning is that, according to Mr. Tarr, there is a growing number of ‘professional hackers’ coming out of the old east-block countries ( ex-soviet states ) who are specifically targeting mobile services in Asia because of the lack of security measures taken by most providers and the percieved potential for monetary gains. I cannot be sure how much of what he said was hype or paranoia, but it is a message that should reinforce our commitment to making products as secure as possible.
Overall it was an interesting, yet short, look at the mobile phone market and trends from a more international perspective. The downsides was there was not enough concrete discussion about the security issues and the event seemed more geared up for networking.