News
Smart Insights: TEE will reshape the mobile security industry, displacing software or hardware only solutions
September 2014 by Marc Jacob
Intelling is publishing a new Smart Insights
Report “TEE Boosts Mobile Security,” that analyzes in detail the dynamics and the
specificities of the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) business. TEE-based solutions are a
recent addition in the mobile security ecosystem, which is dominated by hardware- and
software-based solutions. TEE emerges as an optimum solution, a combined hardwaresoftware
solution, which is easier to deploy than hardware-only solutions, but offers a
greater level of security than software-only solutions. Moreover, TEE offers the execution
capacities of the main processor, while it ensures that sensitive data and applications are
stored, processed and protected from the operating system (e.g. Android) through a Trusted
Execution Environment.
TEE will achieve mass deployment as standardization comes to market and service providers
demand higher security levels for providing their sensitive content. TEE applications include
payment solutions (e.g. mobile payments, mobile banking), content protection, device
management (e.g. BYOD), mobile authentication, ticketing, just to name a few. As solutions
leveraging TEEs increase, devices without the required security features will be marginalized
and lose market share.
According to the Smart Insights Report “TEE Boosts Mobile Security,” TEE shipments are
expected to keep growing in the next years at a 39% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth
Rate) between 2014 and 2019, leading to 2.5 billion TEE units to be shipped in 2019.
Currently, shipments have been mainly registered in smartphones and tablets, but the TEE
security features will drive its expansion to several other devices, such as wearables,
connected consumer electronics, among others.
Among the several devices deploying TEEs, smartphones will account for the largest part of
total shipments, or about 69%, with 1.7 billion units shipped in 2019. Shipments of
smartphones including TEEs will increase at a 34% CAGR over the forecast period. But the
strongest growth will be registered by TEEs in wearables, which shipments will increase at a
94% CAGR between 2014 and 2019. Connected consumer electronics will present the second
greatest increase with a 68% CAGR over the period.
This Smart Insights Report, titled “TEE Boosts Mobile Security,” explores in detail the
business models of the various TEE vendors, and establishes a segmentation of this nascent
market. The research has been conducted combining Smart Insights long-standing experience
in the secure transactions industry with interviews with key players in the TEE and mobile
security industry, as well as stakeholders from mobile network operators, test labs,
technology developers and systems integrators specializing in this area.
