Following annual elections for two rotating Board seats, SIMalliance,the global, non-profit industry association which simplifies aspects of hardware-based device security to drive the creation, deployment and management of secure mobile services, has announced its new Board of Directors for 2016-17.

The Board members appointed to two of the organisation’s six Board seats, which are open to all SIMalliance members and voted for by members present at the association’s Annual General Meeting, are:

• Bertrand Moussel, R&D Director for Payment & Telecom Business Unit, at VALID, and;
• Michele Scarlatella, Central Marketing Director, Incard Division, MMS Group at STMicroelectronics

Michele has been re-elected to the SIMalliance Board and Bertrand has been elected for the first time. Both will serve a one year term.

The four permanent SIMalliance Board seats, retained by the founding SIMalliance member organisations, will continue to be served by:

• Hervé Pierre, Embedded Software & Products (E&P), Senior Director, Strategy, Gemalto
• Christian Lefebvre, Telecom Product Line Director, Oberthur Technologies
• Steffen Frenck, Director Strategy, Telecommunication Industries,Giesecke&Devrient
• Yves Portalier, VP & General Manager, Telecom – Safran Identity and Security.

Hervé Pierre, SIMalliance Chairman, comments: “The annual Board election process ensures the maintenance of a strong SIMalliance leadership team, and enables the organisation to respond to the ever evolving requirements of the global marketplace. A key focus of SIMalliance in the coming twelve months will be to promote the security and risk benefits offered by hardware in an increasingly connected world. For example, standardisation activities for the next generation of mobile communications – 5G – are now well underway and the organisation is actively ensuring that the value of hardware security in protecting all participants in the mobile ecosystem, particularly in machine-to-machine communications, is not overlooked.

“I look forward to working with my SIMalliance Board colleagues to help steer the priorities of the organisation in the year ahead. We are all committed to supporting advances in secure chip technologies, to effectively secure the delivery of data and communications as network technologies develop to meet future requirements across a diverse range of markets.”

SIMalliance has continued its work to facilitate and accelerate delivery of secure mobile applications globally throughout 2015-16. Significant outputs from the past twelve months include:

• 5G: A white paper was published, which analyses security needs across four market segments for 5G – Massive IoT, Critical Communications, Enhanced Mobile Broadband and Network Operations. The paper, titled ‘An Analysis of the Security Needs of the 5G Market’, concludes that while requirements will differ across each market segment, the need for security and privacy in 5G networks will be fundamental across them all. As a result, the paper calls for security to be built into the yet-to-be-determined 5G standard from the very outset.
• OMAPI: An updated version – v3.2 – of SIMalliance’s OMAPI Specification was published. OMAPI v3.2 incorporates changes to accommodate the growing number of dual SIM devices on the market and enhances the ability of mobile applications to communicate with SEs within a device. An update of Open Mobile API (OMAPI) Test Specification for Transport API v2.2 was also released. The test specification outlines mobile device compliance to the OMAPI Specification v3.2 and defines test cases in order that conformance tests can be executed. This update makes it easier to implement and verify the use of the latest version of the OMAPI Specification in handsets.
• eUICC: The eUICC Profile Package: Interoperable Format Test Specification v2.0 was published. This will promote greater interoperability for remote SIM provisioning and subscription management across machine-to-machine (M2M) and consumer devices by ensuring that subscription profiles will be correctly interpreted and implemented by the eUICCs they are provisioned to.

All SIMalliance technical and marketing documents are available and free to download from the Resources area on the SIMalliance website – www.simalliance.org