Source: Global Platform
GlobalPlatform has published a document which allows providers of mobile services to develop remote management* platforms that can be extended to manage applications residing on any type of secure element (SE) in a mobile phone.
The impact will be a shorter time to market for service providers choosing to expand support for their application through additional or new mobile phones which use varying SEs, such as a micro SD card, or embedded SE.
The single, standardized administration protocol defined by the new 'GlobalPlatform Device: Secure Element Remote Application Management v1.0' Specification, offers further benefits beyond universal SE compatibility for the remote management of applications. It also features a retry policy, which ensures that when connection to a network is lost - due to poor network coverage or mobile phone power outage for example - management scripts continue to be resent until they successfully reach the desired location within the SE.
The protocol within this new specification is fully compatible with the protocol used within the GlobalPlatform Card Specification v2.2 - Amendment B. This latter document, which was first published in 2008, allows service providers and application developers to remotely manage applets on a SE within a UICC using the HTTP communication and SSL cryptographic protocols.
Gil Bernabeu, Technical Director of GlobalPlatform, comments: "A standardized approach which enables one administration platform to remotely manage applications across all kinds of SEs will stimulate the mass deployment of SEs within mobile phones, and subsequently more secure mobile service applications. The mobile phone landscape is continuously evolving, with new phone models operating on vastly different technology platforms and using different types of SE emerging all the time; as such this technology addresses a real need among service providers in today's market, who are seeking a simplified and standardized approach to remote application management across different handset models. Now that this technology has been published, GlobalPlatform's next focus is on driving its deployment as standard within all phones that support SEs, to ensure that it delelivers the optimal benefit to service providers and the wider market on a global scale."