Computer Power and Network Connectivity

SECTION I

INTRODUCTION

With increasing computing power and pervasive network connectivity, we have seen significant proliferation in mobile handset usage and experienced mobile handset becoming more open and general-purpose computing environments [1]. More and more applications and services have been applied on mobile devices. Mobile handsets have become the platform carried lots of significant data. Eventually, these developments brought new security challenges, which cannot be satisfied with the conventional security mechanisms. Theft of phones has been a significant issue. Stolen mobile handsets have the risk of exposure of private information if they lack strong protection for access to stored information [2]. In addition, users may choose performance over security, if cryptographic processing influences performance too much. Hardware processing is required to avoid the reckless compromise of security purely for the sake of performance.

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has issued specifications for mobile platform, which contains Mobile Trusted Module (MTM) [3], [4]. Mobile platform is rooted in MTM with a trusted platform-aware architecture manager which provides a security base to establish data protection mechanism. MTM also includes efficient cryptographic computing module to support key generation and data encryption. So establishing a data protection mechanism based on MTM is feasible.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 analyzes existing problems of the data protection mechanisms in the mainstream mobile terminals. Our data protection scheme based on MTM is presented in Section 3 and private key generation and management mechanisms are discussed in Section 4. Section 5 introduces the enc...

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...quipment. So only the equipment could decrypt encrypted data in memory card.

The main advantage of this mechanism is that encrypting function is executed without participation of users and applications, which is convenient for users and reduces the work of application developers. The disadvantage is that it does not use hardware encryption, which will reduce the experience performance of users. And if users have not set lock screen password, the data inside storage card will also leak when storage card is lost.

In conclusion, these mobile terminal equipments have put forward their data security policies currently. But they all have shortcomings. One of the important problems is that the data in external memory card faces a serious threat (except for IOS devices, because they don't support external memory card), which is the problem this paper will solve.