Mobile computing presents many new opportunities for application developers, but these opportunities also come at the expense of increased security threats. These threats exist due to limitations in mobile networks, software and hardware.

This paper focuses on the issues and problems that are unique to the security-conscious mobile developer. More general security issues, affecting the desktop-based developer as well as the mobile developer, are not addressed. For solutions and workarounds to the issues presented here, see the companion Intel® whitepaper to this piece, "Wireless Application Security: What's Up with That?".

Definitions
Asymmetric encryption: a set of complex mathematical algorithms designed to protect a piece of data from interception by unwanted parties using different secret codes for both enciphering and deciphering.

Biometric security: any approach to security that operates by identifying individual users on the basis of their unique physical attributes, such as fingerprints or retinal blood vessel patterns.

Dynamic IP: a system whereby host computers receive different identifying numbers every time they connect to the Internet.

Hashing: a mathematical means of producing a single, large number from a certain amount of data. The data cannot then be altered without changing the number that it would generate.

IPSEC: IP Security, a standard for encrypting TCP/IP packets which prevents interception of packet headers as well as bodies by unauthorized parties.

Secure Shell: an Internet standard protocol for establishing secure communications between a host computer and a terminal-based client.

Static IP: a system whereby host computers receive the same identifying numbers every time they connect to the Internet.

Symmetric encryption: a set of complex mathematical algorithms designed to protect a piece of data from interception by unwanted parties using the same secret code for both enciphering and deciphering.