Vodafone will supply the handsets for the UK’s first secure mobile electronic signature trial.
Next month, the UK Department of Trade and Industry will begin trials to test secure mobile electronic signatures. The scheme, which is the first of its kind in the UK, will be conducted by the Radiocommunications Agency using Vodafone-supplied Siemens C35I digital mobile phones. Vodafone hopes that this trial will go some way to proving that mobile commerce is a viable business proposition and not just an over-hyped fad.
The trial will consist of fifty Radiocommunications Agency employees who will complete and electronically sign their travel and subsistence forms using the Vodafone-supplied mobile phones. The users will activate a cryptographic signature held on the phones’ SIM smartcards, by entering a personal PIN number. The digital signature will be used to encode transmitted data and so ensure that messages cannot be tampered with.
The Electronic Communications Act 2000 legislated that the use of digital signatures was legally binding, so the forthcoming Government trial seems to be a natural progression towards the adoption of mCommerce, which Vodafone is keen to support. If the trial proves successful, Vodafone hopes to conduct similar trials in conjunction with the business community and eventually the wider public. Once the digital signature technology has been proven Vodafone plans to make mobile telephones featuring this technology commercially available.
Paul Donovan, commercial managing director at Vodafone, is confident that these planned trials will be a success, and that the digital signature technology will ultimately enable Vodafone customers to use their mobile phones whenever they currently use their normal signatures. The announcement, coming only a month after Vodafone unveiled its plans to work with Sony to bring PlayStation games to mobile phones, is just the most recent building block in Vodafone’s efforts to make a success of mobile data services.
