The Verizon telecommunications conglomerate is considering the use of blockchain technology to underpin the dynamic creation of virtual SIM cards.
On September 10, the company was granted a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office. UU. By the concept, in which it establishes how the invention could eliminate the pre-inserted physical SIM cards.
The patent describes how a physical SIM card can be replaced by a software equivalent, a virtual SIM (vSIM), which is secured with blockchain-based encryption.
A device in the mobile network would create a user account to store one or more vSIM and a selection of network services that would be associated with the account.
The network device then creates a blockchain record that includes a vSIM certificate for network services and an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), a number that uniquely identifies all users of a cell phone network. The vSIM certificate is linked to the user account and can be activated on a customer’s mobile device.
The nodes participating in the “distributed consensus network” would maintain a list of records that Verizon calls a vSIM blockchain. This would be secured against malicious manipulation by storing time-stamped transactions in cryptographically protected blocks. The records in the vSIM blockchain would be stored in a hash tree structure for greater efficiency and to ensure that the blocks are received “without damage or alteration,” according to the patent.
It should be noted that vSIM can be assigned any of the multiple mobile devices linked to the user account and transferred between the devices. It could also be temporarily assigned to other users, says Verizon.
A backup of everything would be a vSIM platform hosted by the mobile network provider that stores a vSIM user repository using a series of application programming interfaces (APIs).
According to the patent:
This would seem to suggest that, for example, a company could buy a quantity of vSIM, assign them to its staff at will and then reassign them to other employees using the system.
Verizon has previously backed a $ 15 million round of financing for Filament, a company that works on blockchain hardware for the Internet of Things.
