Arriva cellphone tickets let mobiles keep you mobile

surely easy to fake?

Once you know the colour of the day, what else is there to spoof? If there's a group of people travelling together, they can club together to buy one ticket and then use the clone application (which will surely be written if things really are that simple) to duplicate it on the phones of the rest of the group.

Eh?

They're selling this as being more convenient than using cash.

So how does that work then?

You pre book your ticket, board the bus and show the phone to the driver, he then presumably has to check something to verify the ticket - otherwise people would be forging the screen in no time flat. That sounds more complicated than just handing over a few coins.

Another case of a company rushing into a technological solution that's actual more complex than the system it replaces?

Hard to forge?

"Arriva tells us that the combination of a clock ticking away, along with animated Arriva symbols, would make the ticket hard to forge, and that drivers would be advised of that day's colour (orange in the example, top right) to make things harder for the would-be forger."

Java apps are trival to reverse engineer, so your ticking clock and and animated arriva symbols are absolutely not hard to forge. In fact, you wouldn't even have to forge them, just modify their app.

As for the colour... well, that just sound impossible to work around!

I mean, good god, a simple, low-tech solution doesn't mean it has to be full of gaping security holes.

They might as well just use a lie detector and ask the passenger if they've bought a ticket.

Yes, sensible, except for the details.

Details like getting reimbursed by accounting, or not wanting to leave a digital trail, or inability to prove I bought a ticket if the phone suddenly runs out of juice, or not being able to buy a ticket at all if the phone up and dies or better yet, the phone company suddenly develops "technical problems" and takes a week to fix it (hello vodafone; their nosedive took the entire tram service with it too). So, as a computing professional I say:

I'll take a real ticket in return for some real cash, thanks.

BigBadBob

think the article misses the point.....it doesn't need to be high tech....yet, but an interim whilst the world waits for low-cost NFC. The best solutions are the simple ones. The m-ticket also has a security code that changes each and every minute, so be interesting to see how you can spoof that? I tried it on my phone and it's so simple, but that's probably going to disappoint the techno-geeks and the consultants!

Better keep the battery topped up then

Well really