New company aims to make your phone as secure as your bank

Trustonic - a new joint venture that includes ARM
Can Trustonic make our devices more trustworthy?

Trustonic is aiming to make your mobile device so secure that it will fundamentally change DRM on your content, online banking and secure shopping.

Trustonic is a joint venture between ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devirent and the lofty goal is to make our mobile lives significantly less annoying by making our mobile phones and tablets secure.

The venture makes use of the what is known as the Trusted Execution Environment utilising ARM's TrustZone tech which is already being built into the chips of modern devices like the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

What that actually means for us consumers is that our mobile devices should become trustworthy enough to retailers, banks and service providers to cut back on modern day annoyances.

DRM change

That potentially means that your subscription to a film streaming service could become a download service because the spectre of piracy shrinks significantly to the companies that make the content.

On top of that, your bank will allow you to use your phone as a secure and trustworthy device, and that you can pay for things much more quickly without having to go through the various security problems that are often present in the buying process.

"This fundamentally changes our devices," Trustonic's CEO Ben Cade told TechRadar. "That's because you start with the premise that your device is trusted."

Cade suggests in the company's opening public statement that the launch represents a 'turning point' in our connected world.

"In the first half of next year we'll be trialling the service with certain service providers, banks and Fortune 500 companies with broadstream adoption from the second half of 2013," he added.

Of course, the service will be limited to devices that have the ARM architecture, although the necessary hardware is increasingly common and Cade suggests that a huge percentage of new devices in the past six months have shipped with what is needed to run the new venture's offering.

Patrick Goss

Patrick Goss is the ex-Editor in Chief of TechRadar. Patrick was a passionate and experienced journalist, and he has been lucky enough to work on some of the finest online properties on the planet, building audiences everywhere and establishing himself at the forefront of digital content.  After a long stint as the boss at TechRadar, Patrick has now moved on to a role with Apple, where he is the Managing Editor for the App Store in the UK.