A Data Confidentiality Approach to Short Message Service (SMS) on Android

Abstract

Short Message Service (SMS) is a text messaging service component of mobile communication systems. It uses standardized communications protocols to exchange short text between mobile devices. SMS does not have any built-in procedure to offer security for the text transmitted as data. Most of the applications for mobile devices are designed and developed without taking security into consideration. As confidentiality is the original purpose of cryptology, the proposed system is introduced a data confidentiality approach to SMS on Android. It includes SMS network architecture as well as cryptographic protocols as theory background and it also deals with design, implementation and confidentiality assessment of RC4 stream cipher for SMS data confidentiality on mobile networks. In practical use, SMS messages are not encrypted by default during transmission. To secure the message, the receiver needs to put password. In the thesis, RC4 stream cipher is implemented by using Key-Scheduling Algorithm (KSA) and Pseudo-Random Generation Algorithm (PRGA) in Java programming language.