SIM locking
AssigneeVodafone IP Licensing Limited
InventorsStephen Babbage, Nicholas Bone
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Where a smartcard is embedded or inaccessible within a cellular telecommunications device (i.e. an eUICC), locking the smartcard (or the subscription associated with the smartcard) to a particular MNO while allowing the MNO to be altered legitimately presents a challenge. A method is described using policy control tables stored in a trusted service manager registry and/or the smartcard's data store. By maintaining the policy control table, any MNO subscription may be downloaded/activated on the smartcard but the device will be prevented from accessing the desired MNO because that access would violate the lock rules.
Claims20
A method for personalization of a mobile equipment, the mobile equipment having a physically unswappable smart card personalized to a first telecommunications subscription of a first mobile network operator (MNO) to thereby lock the mobile equipment to a telecommunications network of the first MNO, wherein the first telecommunications subscription is available on the smart card and is updateable, the method comprising:
- receiving, at a trusted service manager (TSM), a request to replace the first telecommunications subscription of the first MNO with a second telecommunications subscription of a second MNO;
- accessing, by the TSM, a personalization rule table record corresponding to the smart card to determine whether the personalization rule table record indicates that the requested replacement is forbidden;
- and
- upon a condition in which the personalization rule table record does not indicate that the requested replacement is forbidden:
- transmitting, from the TSM to the smart card, a seed that is useable by the smart card to generate a cipher key for encrypting user data and signaling data;
- receiving, at the TSM, a unique network authentication key for the second MNO that is derived from both a pre-loaded master key stored on the smart card and the seed transmitted from the TSM;
- and
- facilitating, by the TSM, a logical swap to the second telecommunications subscription by using the derived unique network authentication key for the second MNO to personalize the smart card of the mobile equipment to the second telecommunications subscription, the second telecommunications subscription locking the mobile equipment to a telecommunications network of the second MNO.
A system for personalization of a mobile equipment, the mobile equipment having a physically unswappable smart card personalized to a first telecommunications subscription of a first mobile network operator (MNO) to thereby lock the mobile equipment to a telecommunications network of the first MNO, wherein the first telecommunications subscription is available on the smart card and is updateable, and wherein the system performs at least the following:
- receive, at a trusted service manager (TSM), a request to replace the first telecommunications subscription of the first MNO with a second telecommunications subscription of a second MNO;
- access, by the TSM, a personalization rule table record corresponding to the smart card to determine whether the personalization rule table record indicates that the requested replacement is forbidden;
- and
- upon a condition in which the personalization rule table record does not indicate that the requested replacement is forbidden:
- transmit, from the TSM to the smart card, a SEED that is useable by the smart card to generate a cipher key for encrypting user data and signaling data;
- receive, at the TSM, a unique network authentication key for the second MNO that is derived from both a pre-loaded master key stored on the smart card and the SEED;
- and
- facilitate, by the TSM, a logical swap to the second telecommunications subscription by using the derived unique network authentication key for the second MNO to personalize the smart card to the second telecommunications subscription.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.