> The SIM card, as a piece of plastic used to identify your phone number and mobile operator, is indeed pre-historic technology.
I highly doubt so. SIM cards are hardware tokens, which securely hold cryptographic keys — are those things obsolete or pre-historic?
They're holding a shared encryption key (so-called Ki) but never reveal it directly. This is the point of SIM cards.
SIM cards could (and, I believe, were) implemented in software, but such implementations reduce security, usability or both.
(Yes, nowadays, I believe, almost no operator would tell you what Ki is recorded on your SIM card, so you won't be able to clone the card. But that's a completely another issue.)
I highly doubt so. SIM cards are hardware tokens, which securely hold cryptographic keys — are those things obsolete or pre-historic?
They're holding a shared encryption key (so-called Ki) but never reveal it directly. This is the point of SIM cards.
SIM cards could (and, I believe, were) implemented in software, but such implementations reduce security, usability or both.
(Yes, nowadays, I believe, almost no operator would tell you what Ki is recorded on your SIM card, so you won't be able to clone the card. But that's a completely another issue.)