HANOVER, GERMANY (02/23/2000) - Mobile electronic commerce has not yet lived up to the promise held out by the exploding number of mobile phone users, partly because there is no standardized way to authenticate mobile transactions, according to the chief executive officer of German e-commerce software vendor Brokat Infosystems AG.
Brokat Chairman and CEO Stefan Roever detailed here today an effort to rectify that problem, at least for phones using the GSM (global system for mobile communications) standard.
The Stuttgart-based company is spearheading an effort to develop standardized digital signature technology for GSM phones, integrating the necessary hardware and software for such transactions into the phone itself.
The E-Sign consortium, first announced in December, is a cooperative effort among software vendors, smart-card companies, certificate-authority centers, mobile phone equipment companies and network operators.
Complicated procedures have scared away consumers from adopting digital signatures for e-commerce on their home computers, Roever said. The procedure requires users to run a smart card through a special reader attached to their PC to identify themselves and to confirm that both sides of the transaction are legitimate.
"There is a big effort involved in installing a smart card reader, and users are given no mobility -- they are tied to that particular PC," Roever said, citing the disadvantages of that method.
A mobile phone could change that, however, because every GSM phone has in it a SIM (subscriber identity module) card that can be turned into a card reader, Roever said. "It's a mobile business enabler."
A customer doing mobile banking, for example, enters a PIN (personal identification number) into the phone that activates the digital signature capability stored in the phone's SIM card. The phone user then waits for the bank to verify and then carry out the banking transaction. A customer could, at the same time, be hooked up to a bank call center. The information would be exchanged via SMS (short message service); the technology will also be made to conform with WAP (wireless application protocol).
E-Sign's members include Siemens AG ; Sonera Smarttrust Ltd., the security subsidiary of Finland's Sonera Corp.; mobile carriers E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH and Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH; the carrier Viag Interkom GmbH & Co.; smart-card companies Schlumberger Ltd. and Gemplus SA; and T-Telesec Trust Center, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG.
After setting out specifications of the interface for the digital signature transactions, e-Sign expects the first trials to take place in the second quarter of the year, with commercial launches by year's end, said Jozsef Bugovics, executive vice president of business development at Brokat.
It also expects new members from the U.S. and Asia to join by June, Bugovics said.
E-Sign can be reached at http://www.esign-consortium.org/. Brokat, in Stuttgart, can be reached at +49-711-788-44-311 or at http://www.brokat.de/.