Title: End-to-end security mechanisms for SMS

Authors: Jing-Shyang Hwu, Shih-Feng Hsu, Yi-Bing Lin, Rong-Jaye Chen

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu County, Taiwan. ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu County, Taiwan. ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu County, Taiwan. ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu County, Taiwan

Abstract: In the mobile communication systems, security (encryption) offered by the network operator applies only on the wireless link. Data delivered through the mobile core network may not be protected. Existing end-to-end security mechanisms are provided at application level and typically based on public key cryptosystem. This paper introduces two encryption mechanisms based on the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) scheme and the Identity-based (ID-based) scheme to provide end-to-end security for Short Message Service (SMS). We implement these two mechanisms over the standard SMS network architecture and estimate the encryption overhead. Our study indicates that the ID-based mechanism has advantages over the RSA mechanism in key distribution and scalability of increasing security level for mobile service.

Keywords: end-to-end security; identity-based cryptography; ID-based cryptography; public key; mobile communications; encryption; short message service; SMS security; networks; Rivest-Shamir-Adleman; mobile services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2006.011777

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2006 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.177 - 183

Published online: 21 Dec 2006 *

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