Self-Encryption Scheme for Data Security in Mobile Devices

Abstract

The pervasive use of wireless networks and mobile devices has been changing our living style significantly. Along with great convenience and efficiency, there are new challenges in protecting sensitive and/or private data carried in these devices. The most challenging part lies in a dilemma: while it should be computationally infeasible for adversaries to decrypt the data, the cryptographic operation should be efficient for legitimate users and minimize battery drain. This paper proposes a novel data encryption and storage scheme to address this challenge. Treating the data as a binary bit stream, our self-encryption (SE) scheme generates a keystream by randomly extracting bits from the stream. The length of the keystream depends on the user's security requirements. The bit stream is encrypted and the ciphertext is stored on the mobile device, whereas the keystream is stored separately. This makes it computationally not feasible to recover the original data stream from the ciphertext alone.