The Application of Programmable DSPs in Mobile Communications

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Security Paradigm for Mobile Terminals

Edgar Auslander, Jerome Azema, Alain Chateau and Loic Hamon

As was highlighted in Chapter 1, the mobile phone has become a personal device that has strong potential to morph into a mobile wallet, or a mobile entertainment device. In both cases, merchants or service providers will want to bill for content or service provision. There lies an opportunity for fraud. When your phone only stores names of people you call, there is not much interest in hacking the device; when it contains your credit card information, however, a lot of energy will be spent trying to steal or hack your mobile phone. Telecommunication fraud has been documented already in the early days of the telegraph, though every attempt was then made to guard the secrecy of transmissions. There was clearly money to be made at the time by speculators if, for instance, they could find a way to transmit news from the stock market in, say, Paris, to other parts of the country faster than the daily papers. A curious case of fraud was discovered on the Paris to Bordeaux line. Two bankers, the brothers Francois and Joseph Blanc, had bribed the telegraph operators at a station just behind Tours to introduce a specific pattern of errors into the transmissions, to signal the direction in which the stock market was moving in Paris to an accomplice in Bordeaux. The telegraph operators near Tours received their instructions from Paris by ordinary (stage-coach) mail, in the form of packages ...