New technologies unveiled to protect U.K. 75 million mobile phone users from crime

Design and Technology Alliance and the Design Council will be calling for the industry to protect their customers by adopting these innovative security technologies.

Here are some comments made regarding the new solutions:

• Home Office Minister Alan Campbell said: “Overall crime has fallen since 1997 but as new technology creates new opportunities for the user it can also provide criminals with opportunities as well. This is where designing out crime can make a real difference and we are leading the way by using technology to protect the public. I believe the solutions developed by this challenge have the potential to be as successful as previous innovations like Chip and Pin, which reduced fraud on lost or stolen cards to an all time low, and would encourage industry to continue working with us and take them up.”
• Joe McGeehan, member and managing director, Toshiba Europe and Director for Communications Research, BristolUniversity, said: ‘With the rapid growth in mobile phone usage, and particularly the smart phone, more and more people are carrying sensitive information on their handsets thereby increasing their vulnerability to identity theft. It is essential that individuals have the ability to protect themselves against such crime. The Alliance has been encouraging the mobile communications industry to provide better, more user-friendly and innovative tools, for this purpose. The recent ‘Challenge’ was an initiative taken by the Alliance to bring top design organisations and high tech companies together to develop such tools.”
• The technologies were developed in consultation with experts from some of the biggest phone companies and manufacturers.
• David Kester, Alliance member and chief executive, Design Council, said: “It’s about thinking smarter than criminals. Designers have provided innovations that are one step ahead; new phones are still desirable to consumers but they’re useless to criminals if they’re equipped with these new concepts. The technology behind each of these ideas provides UK companies with promising business opportunities.”
• David Bott, Alliance member and director of innovation programs, Technology Strategy Board, said: “The ability of the Technology Strategy Board to use its networks and stimulate collaboration between technology and design companies has been a very fruitful experience for all involved. With our goal of accelerating innovative products to market, we have been very pleased to fund this challenge.”
• Steve Babbage, Security Technologies Manager and Group Chief Cryptographer, Vodafone Group R&D, said: “Security is likely to be an increasingly important issue for consumers in the coming years. These prototypes show real working solutions that could reduce mobile phone crime and make phone users, their identities, their sensitive data and their cash safer.”
• Jack Wraith, secretary of the Communications Crime Strategy Group, said: “The telecommunications industry welcomes the innovative work that has and is being done by the Alliance Against Crime and the Design Council in making the operation of mobile phones a more secure experience for the consumer. The winning prototypes from the Challenge demonstrate that design and security can go hand in hand.”

Previous advances in technology have led to unexpected new forms of crime; e-mail heralded the phenomenon of ‘phishing’, ATMs precipitated the new crime of “card catching,” and online banking gave rise to “key logging,” used by fraudsters to track the input of secret passwords and account numbers.

There are, however, many examples of technology being applied successfully to reduce crime — for example, British Crime Survey figures show theft of vehicles has reduced by 51 percent since 1997 as a result of improved security being designed into the vehicle, and an evaluation of houses built to the ACPO Secured By Design (SBD) standards showed that these experience 26 percent less crime than non SBD houses, and residents fear of crime is lower.

The introduction of Chip and PIN has helped reduce fraud on lost or stolen cards to its lowest total since the industry began collating fraud loss figures in 1991.

The Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime

The Alliance is a group of experts in design, technology, business, and crime who, through the Design Council’s Design Out Crime initiative, aim to get more companies to “think crime” in developing products and services. The Alliance says it recognized the need for new technologies to protect the users of the increasingly sophisticated smart phones from data-related fraud and theft, and instigated the £400,000 Mobile Phone Security Challenge, which was delivered by the Design Council and funded by the Technology Strategy Board.