Web Commerce Security Design and Development

Mobile Technologies: Mosquito on Steroids

Mobile phones were originally designed and manufactured to make a simple phone call. Today's smartphones are small yet powerful computing devices that contain many more capabilities than simply making a phone call. Modern mobile devices contain processors that clock near 1 GHz; this is more processing power than many desktop computers had in early 2000. In this section, you learn that mobile devices and the carrier infrastructure that they connect to are not architected with security as their fundamental design principle.

An exhaustive security analysis of the entire mobile ecosystem that explains how its many underlying subsystems are interlaced to facilitate m-commerce demands its own book (hint!). As such this section is not an exhaustive analysis of all mobile technologies. You learn the inner workings of the most important building blocks of a mobile ecosystem, and the section provides a brief security analysis of each. You will start with carrier networks and work your way to the most important client stacks, and conclude with the security analysis of the back-end infrastructure that provides m-commerce services.

Carrier Networks

A mobile device is just one part of a much larger system: the carrier (or cellular) network, which is the infrastructure that provides connectivity to mobile phones. Historically, both the carrier network and the mobile devices that operate within their boundaries were closed systems. That is, the mobile ...