Traditionally, concerns about security have been related to fixed network technology due to the historical limitations of what mobile networks were able to do and what mobile devices could actually understand.
Over the past five years, all of these limitations have changed with the smartphone’s evolution to being capable of what today’s desktop can do, the blurring of the lines between the fixed and mobile networks as perceived by the end-user, and the introduction of 3G, mobile broadband, Wimax and LTE.
Subscribers and network operators share a growing unease as to how secure our information and content is in this new converging world where various forms of communications are available through any device, whether from the fixed or mobile networks. In addition, traffic of any kind can now be seamlessly routed between fixed and mobile networks. This raises the concern of how we manage this increased security complexity.
Mobile devices today are no longer anonymous since caller ID services are not the only way to reveal our identities. The same applications we now use to access services online connect through the internet and establish an electronic identity for us, which can be tracked whether using a fixed or mobile network.
Governments, regulators, operators and vendors all need to take a collective responsibility for improving security requirements and solution offerings to capture all aspects of today’s communications and associated platforms. There are questions concerning national security. How do we protect users’ personal security when they share or download information on line constantly? How do we ensure networks are secure from flooding, remote control, and fraud attacks?
Apart from providing security at the network level, the industry needs to consider the security of the content accessed or protection over content that can be downloaded. This is all the more necessary especially with mobile phones increasingly becoming commonplace with young children.