Authorization mechanisms for mobile commerce implementations in enhanced prepaid solutions

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) provides an exciting set of new capabilities that service providers can leverage to grow their revenue base while attracting new services that enhance the end-user experience. With these new opportunities the risk of new security threats that need to be addressed also arises. In this paper, security issues — in particular, those dealing with service and subscriber authorizations — in enhanced prepaid implementations for m-commerce — are discussed. These products typically provide an enriched rating engine and a highly configurable feature set for service and content charging in wireless networks. Client application and subscriber-level authentication and authorization are key mechanisms that serve to regulate access to, and usage of, content-based transactions in m-commerce. Solution architectures and a discussion of authorization criteria are presented.