"The latest generation of CryptoCell incorporates significantly improved countermeasures and performance against attacks, but because it needs [lower] gate counts, it reduces the bill of materials for mobile-phone manufacturers," said Gal Salomon, chief executive officer of Discretix Technologies.

The company also announced that Ericsson Mobile Platforms has expanded its licensing agreement with the company to incorporate the latest version of Discretix's security technology in the next version of the mobile-phone platform Ericsson sells to OEMs and ODMs.

"Security is becoming a growing headache, be it from malicious messaging attacks, viruses, theft or fraud, as well as denial of service and network malfunctioning," said Edo Ganot, vice president of marketing and business development at Discretix. "Carriers are demanding phones with hardware-based security." That demand is bound to increase as mobile operators start offering content over the latest handsets, Ganot added.

The CryptoCell device incorporates a coprocessor core, security infrastructure software and device drivers. Ganot said the part lets handset suppliers quickly integrate the security demanded by network operators for the latest mobile applications. Common applications for which Discretix's technology can be customized include digital rights management agents, over-the-air device management clients, VPN clients and device anti-theft solutions.

Those applications are built over a comprehensive security-infrastructure layer that includes standard application programming interfaces as well as PKCS No 11, WTLS, SSL, WIM Token and certificate handling.