Big Four Wireless Carriers Demo Mobile Authentication, Want to Do Away with Passwords

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The big four wireless carriers have put aside their competition to cooperate on something that all subscribers need: A standard approach to mobile authentication.

The four are members of the Mobile Authentication Taskforce, which demoed its solution at the Mobile World Congress Americas 2018 in Los Angeles.

Mobile Authentication

The solution is less dependent on passwords to secure user accounts, according to a press release. The multifactor scheme combines carriers’ proprietary, network-based authentication capabilities with other approaches to verify a subscriber’s identity. The solution creates a device-based ID that represents the user’s profile during the authentication process.

It is helpful that a neutral party architected the platform. “This initiative expands upon our global operator initiative, Mobile Connect, to bring standardized authentication and identity services to the US market,” Alex Sinclair, the Chief Technology Officer of the GSMA, said in a press release. “The solution aims to deliver a seamless experience for service providers from many sectors, helping to drive rapid adoption and scale.”

The demonstration was held at the GSMA Innovation City at the show. It featured mock-up banking, photo and social media apps. The goal is to protect subscribers against efforts to steal login credential and mobile phone numbers that later will be used in illegal activities such as phishing and social engineering. It will offer extra protection against identity theft, bank fraud, fraudulent purchases and data theft.

The taskforce launched a website to attract developers and is looking at creating products that use the technology.

Mobile authentication is an increasingly important topic as people rely more on their devices and mobile commerce and as wireless transmission of sensitive personal and mission-critical business data becomes more common. The fact that the big four agree on this approach shows how important it is to their ecosystems to have a ubiquitous standard.