The Indian government is reportedly planning to come up with guidelines to issue encrypted SIM cards with digital signatures unique to an individual or company, allowing secure interaction over email and SMS from a mobile phone. Moreover, mobile banking services would also take advantage of the increased communication security.
N Vijayaditya, Controller of Certifying Authority talking about the project said, “To make India’s future in mobile banking and mobile transactions secure, we are recommending the certification of proxy SIM cards with digital certificates, which can be inserted on top of regular SIM cards. These will enable the signatures with emails and even SMSes sent via mobile phones.”
The problem, however, may be in the data charges — while a regular 160 character SMS is about 40-50 bytes of data, digitally certified message would be around 256KB. Enterprises may consider using secure SMS, while it is said to be a hassle to manage for the end users. We’ll see where this goes and how it affects the mobile industry in the world’s second largest market…
[Via: ZDnet]