Mobile Phone Standards to Launch in 2006

The mobile phones for sale during the 2006-2007 holiday season should be a lot more secure than this year's crop, thanks to a new mobile security specification that likely to be released in the first half of 2006.

The specification is being developed by the Trusted Computing Group, an industry association backed by mobile vendors such as Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung.

The TCG has already created standards for PCs, servers, and networks designed to make computing more secure; and at this week's Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association Wireless IT and Entertainment conference in San Francisco, the group took a step toward finalizing its mobile standard.

Today, the TCG released a number of use cases defining the areas that it expects its mobile standards to cover. These documents discuss things such as locking down phones to make them harder to use when they are lost or stolen, managing software updates and patches, and supporting secure payments via mobile devices.

In a statement, the TCG said that it expects to have a publicly available mobile phone specification ready in the first half of 2006. If this happens, devices supporting the specification should begin to emerge by the end of next year.

The first mobile phones built with the TCG's mobile security technology should be harder to use without proper authorization. As more infrastructure is built to support the TCG standards, phones will become more resistant to mobile viruses and other forms of abuse.

Farther along, when mobile phones become even more secure, they could evolve into a kind of electronic wallet that could be used to authenticate buyers and sellers in online transactions.