Secured multi-identity mobile infrastructure and offline mobile-assisted micro-payment application

Wireless networks are increasingly deployed in every-day services. The mobile device is becoming a part of the personal identity for its owner. New mobile standards, such as 3GPP are offering more and more mobile user application areas. It seems very useful to deploy the mobile device itself to support its owner's security and his applications. As mobile devices have no secured identity in current standards, we propose first a secured device multi-identity infrastructure. This infrastructure would enable users to accommodate provable identities without involving the network operator. These physical provable identities stick physically to the device hardware and can be securely authenticated over the whole network. We proposed in W. Adi, a global provable mobile identity mechanism. This concept is extended to multi-identity profile to establish a powerful mobile device security infrastructure. Based on this infrastructure, a new mobile assisted offline micro-payment system is presented. The system is equivalent to a pre-certified payment, which can be offline verified. The proposal deploys the mobile device multi-identity capability to prove the validity and eligibility of an issued electronic payment to a merchant. The merchant can verify (offline) that the customer's bank entitled the mobile device holder to issue an electronic payment within given limits. The system exhibits public key facilities without traditional high complexity public key processing and does not involve online operations. That makes the proposal especially more efficient for wireless environment. The developed multi-identity mechanisms open also new horizons for the use of such infrastructure to secure other new similar applications.