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Mobile services have already become a corner stone of daily life in many developed and developing countries, ranging from simple, localized tourist guides to city-scale wireless network services and multiple nation-wide mobile payment applications. However, many of these services either offer low security (or, often, none at all) for end users or are too complicated to set up in order to be securely accessible by typical end users. Overcoming these limitations in security and usability offers the potential for future ground-breaking applications towards even better mobility and convergence of devices and end-user services. One of the motivating visions is to – globally, securely, and intuitively usably – substitute current wallets and key chains by suitable services and applications on mobile phones. This includes typical credit, debit, and store card functionality, secure and anonymous cash transactions, locking and unlocking doors and other resources, as well as passports, identity cards, licenses, and insurance cards.

The goal of the Josef Ressel Center for User-friendly Secure Mobile Environments is the analysis of security issues in current and future mobile applications; the design, development, and evaluation of concepts, methods, protocols, and prototypical implementations for addressing them; and communication and co-ordination with industry partners and standardization organizations towards establishing globally accepted standards for secure, interoperable, mobile services.

Expected outcomes include cryptographic standards, guidelines documents for secure mobile service development, tools to assist in such development processes, and an extended version of the Android mobile device operating system which will include embedded smartcard support, virtualization on mobile device, extended security policies, and improved user authentication methods.