Security Notes Cautionary Notes on the Smart-Phone Age

 

Gideon Samid • Gideon@AGSgo.com

 

 

 

Yesterday’s visionaries shocked their audience by proclaiming a distant reality of “a phone in every home.” Today’s visionaries proclaim “a home in every phone.” And an office too, and with it your school, your movie theatre, your bank!

 

Computers, entertainment systems, home-security control boards, exercise machines, all gradually render into generics, dumb boxes controlled, managed, and run by … your phone.

 

Vast areas around the globe have no infrastructure to rely on except a few cell-phone towers. If they don’t render the phones into their banks, they will have no banks and no economic infrastructure.

 

To realize this advanced vision it will be absolutely necessary to create a seamless payment environment because whenever some people get together they normally wish to exchange valuables, deal, and trade. And wherever money is, fraud comes rushing in. That is why we, on the security end of things, need to do our homework.

 

Patchwork will not do, plumbing is a failed strategy. We must first recognize that this “life by phone” emerging paradigm represents a host of unprecedented opportunities to the bad guys. The phone is always on. Anyone can call you from anywhere, text you, upload from you, download to you, locate you geographically, track your whereabouts, and find out who the people are that you talk to and deal with.

 

More than 60,000 mobile phones are simply left behind in taxis every year in New York City alone. Reportedly one in three Americans experiences a loss or theft of his mobile phone. We have encountered cases where a diner returned to the restaurant where he left the phone on the table minutes ago, and had it returned to him after its full load of data was copied—unbeknownst to him. You may be very careful with your phone, but the person you share sensitive text messages with may not be.

 

Today your phone makes you an instant merchant. If it is stolen, it’s like you gave a thief access to your cash register. Recently the courts allowed authorities to search your cell phone without a warrant. People buy and install a barrage of applets. How clean, how innocent are these programs?

 

Alas, you can count on the drive for convenience to triumph over the fear of fraud and abuse.

 

The long-term picture, though, looks pretty good. Money will mature into digital currency. This will do away with today’s money accounting page vulnerability. Identity theft will be thwarted by a plethora of means. For example, the phone’s camera will take your image and the other party will perform facial recognition and stress measurements, the first to verify that it’s you who’s using the phone and second to make sure you haven’t been coerced to do so. The phone’s mike will grab your voice for both personal identification and stress measurements. Other biometrics will hook up too.

 

And new patents coming down the pike will data-disable the phone if it is not carried around so that it cannot be compromised while you stow it or leave it on your night table. Another patent keeps the phone running as long as it communicates with a chip that you wear like a necklace or a wedding ring. Otherwise, it’s dead. So you don’t lose your world when you misplace your phone.

 

In fact, the full force of identity verification and data security will be applied to the phone because the phone will become the smarts behind your computer system, which will provide screen, mouse, and keyboard. The phone will hold the confidential data to lock, unlock, and operate your home security, etc. Forget wait-for-approval credit cards. Smart programs will pre-clear funds for cash-like digital currency transfers. Paper receipts will soon be replaced with screen-receipts. Today’s cloud backup services will shift from your PC to your phone so you can buy the newest hand-held gizmo and download your previous phone data to it while disabling the data on the lost, stolen, or upgraded old phone.

 

My computer-security students today watch my Crypto-Academy lectures on their phone. I listen to their homework as I bike in the outdoors while my phone GPS brings me safely home, where I work on ensuring the security of digital money to be phone-transferred at my local Starbucks or phone-texted to our developer in Bangalore.

 

The PC is passé, and plastic money will not stay. The age of the phone is unstoppable, however slow and lagging the security catch-up act.