Environmental Key based Smartphone Data Encryption

Abstract

Recently, smartphones have become one of the most important electronic devices in human being’severyday lives. Currently, a huge amount of private data is stored in smartphones, mobile devices,and cloud storages. However, unencrypted data may be hijacked in its transmission or unauthorizedaccessed by storage and/or delivery service provider. To secure private data for smartphones, in thispaper, we propose a novel data encryption method, named the Environmental Key based Smartphonedata Encryption (EKSE), with which private data or private photos stored in personal devices canbe encrypted by an encryption key derived from one environmental matching key and several publicmatching keys, where an environmental matching key is a key derived from user’s password and personaldevice’s parameters, and the corresponding public matching key is generated by using ellipticcurve encryption based on the environmental matching key. Our analyses show that the EKSE is ableto resist machine-specific data leakage, insider threats, and impersonation attacks.