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ARM wants mobile or IoT devices to include a tiny integrated SIM card:
Every millimeter of space matters when you're trying to build increasingly complex electronics into increasingly tiny packages, and the relatively spacious SIM card has long been an area of frustration for hardware manufacturers. Now, the chip design company ARM may have an answer: an integrated component called an iSIM that's built into the same chip as the processor.
ARM says the iSIM will take up a "fraction of a millimeter squared," whereas the current SIM standard — Nano SIMs — are about 12.3 x 8.8mm in size, not including the hardware usually needed to house them. Not only will that save space, but ARM says it'll more importantly save on costs, too: instead of paying "tens of cents" per card, manufacturers will be paying single-digital cents.
Also at CNET, Tom's Hardware, and Wccftech.
Related: Infineon Demos a 1.65 mm^2 eSIM Chip
(Score: 3, Insightful) by WeekendMonkey on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:09PM (3 children)
A technology like this is bound to be cloud based. Just upload your SIM to the cloud and download to a new device, better still it can be downloaded by your favourite hacking group/TLA in the next big breach.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:51PM (1 child)
I hope not all manufacfurers will implement this.
I like to keep these things separate, SIM and phone/imei. I do not want a manufacturer now trade imei nrs with vodafone phones and customer data and the viceversa.
And why the fuck would I want a phone that has 20 sims embedded like someone above mentioned? For all I know it also could have 20 more which do not show up and are used each for whatever purpose. Like for constantly uploading coordinates, another for sensory data, another for microphone voice chanel, another for vnc like connections in hardware. And since my buddy will have the same kind of device, since I have his number, why not add another chanel to connect to it directly and relay that info too? He is visiting Moscow these days you know?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:02PM
20 seems a bit more than normal, but for a phone it's often useful to have separate contracts for local voice, international voice calls, voice calls while roaming, data in your home country, and data in the country that you're visiting. With most phones, that requires juggling 5 SIMs and you can't, for example, easily use one for incoming calls and one for outgoing calls. With eSIM, you can have multiple virtual SIMs and control what you use each one for.
That's an entirely pointless thing to worry about. On most phones, the baseband is a separate chip that communicates with the main SoC. It runs closed source firmware and communicates with the outside world via an encrypted connection. If someone wanted to put malicious code in your phone, they can do it already. A typical smartphone SoC has a few dozen ARM cores, of which 4-8 are exposed to the OS. Most of the others have complete access to the bus and run code that isn't visible to you.
All of this is possible without interacting with the OS on most existing smartphones, if you have control over the baseband firmware.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @10:12AM
I bet you are one of those people who store their dropbox password in their dropbox as well.
The SIM card is your authentication towards the phone company. If you make it cloud based, you'll need some kind of authentication to access your authentication.