Vodafone Germany has just announced a new SIM card based encryption for data communication over its network, where they intend to expand this particular feature to voice communication, too. Apparently, Vodafone has plans to secure customers’ data communication using a SIM card based solution that was made possible in the past thanks to the use of separate smart cards or tokens. Vodafone Germany came up with this particular solution after working alongside its security partner Giesecke & Devrient (G&D).
This particular security solution will make use of a PIN as well as a digital signature in order to encrypt the data at the sender’s end, as well as decrypt data at the receiver’s ends via the SIM. Other data including emails, documents, VPN connections and other forms of data communication will also be secured using this particular solution. At this point in time, the Secure SIM solution relies on S/MIME encryption, although they do intend to make use of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) sometime down the road as the system becomes more and more mature.
Carsten Ahrens, Group Senior Vice President of Vodafone Germany’s Server Software and Services division, mentioned, “We created Vodafone Secure SIM Data as a simple, cost-efficient and above all secure value-added service based on the Vodafone SIM card for the telecommunications group’s corporate customers.”