Good Things Come in Small Packages: An Overview of the Certicom Security Architecture for Mobility

In the mobility ecosystem, increased consumer market penetration combined with growing competitive pressures are forcing product and service providers to differentiate their offerings with rich new capabilities to drive revenues and replacement rates. To protect these new revenue streams as well as private user information, comprehensive security is quickly becoming mandatory for mobile environments. Fraud, theft and design portability issues have shown that security is best embedded within a mobile device, rather than adding security late in the design process.

The Certicom Security Architecture for Mobility allows device manufacturers to quickly and cost-effectively build comprehensive, optimized security into their devices in order to differentiate their phone, drive replacement rates, and satisfy the security requirements of operators, enterprises and end users. It allows handset manufacturers to embed security across multiple families and generations of devices, and rounds out the ability of mobile processor vendors to deliver whole security solutions to their handset manufacturer customers.

This paper describes the business and technical challenges of security facing both groups and how the Certicom Security Architecture for Mobility addresses each of them. To put the market situation in perspective, it discusses the overall need for security in the mobile ecosystem and how these needs trickle down to—and create an opportunity for—mobile handset manufacturers and mobile processor vendors.