Messaging through todays GSM network is not secure. This thesis will try to make use of standard cryptography and Java2 Micro Edition to make a prototype for secure messaging using a modern mobile phone. This prototype will be tested in an operative real-life setting, in order to gain knowledge about usability and people's ability to successfully send and receive secure messages. These results will be analyzed and compared against other systems for other environments.
As is, SMS using a standard mobile phone is not particular secure. In an electronic mail setting there are many different systems for secure communications. How can one achieve similar functionality for messaging on mobile phones, using standard cryptography and mobile phones?
Why on a mobile phone?
Until now SMS messaging has been rather innocent and trivial in its use. But more and more of our business communications is based on SMS messages. Even the security systems at banks and intranets utilize SMS messages. The amount of SMS messages sent increases, and so does the range of use, but the security has not been adjusted accordingly.
It's time to bring security and privacy onto our mobile phones as well.
It is not likely to believe that mobile phones will be used for government and/or military crypto devices. These kind of organisations have the resources to manage this on their own. But, such devices are often big and clumsy, designed for one purpose only, based on relatively old technology, and there are as usual strict policies regulating the usage of them.
So, on one hand we have these expensive high-grade crypto devices, and on the other hand we have our standard GSM mobile phone. With this in mind, small agile devices, such as mobile phones, can fill the gap between the high grade crypto systems described above and the unsecure services of the GSM network.
Research questions
