Advances in hardware
Mobile operating systems have come a long way. When I started working on mobiles, we had candy bar phones that did little more than make phone calls and had basic utilities such as calculator and a widget to show the time and date. To support the advanced use cases for mobile, security has to be built in the hardware itself. There are some efforts in this direction that I have discussed in the following sections.
Hardware security module
Hardware security module, also called a secure element, is a piece of hardware (chip) embedded in the hardware to store cryptographic keys and other sensitive information. The idea is to provide an isolated, tamper resistant environment to store PII. In some cases, a secure element can be carried with the device as well. Examples of secure elements include an enhanced SIM card controlled by a mobile network operator, a chip embedded in the device itself, or a micro SD card with a special circuit built-in. Many Android phones come equipped...
