Environmental Key based Smartphone Data Encryption

Abstract

Recently, smartphones have become one of the most important electronic devices in human being’s
everyday 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 unauthorized
accessed by storage and/or delivery service provider. To secure private data for smartphones, in this
paper, we propose a novel data encryption method, named the Environmental Key based Smartphone
data Encryption (EKSE), with which private data or private photos stored in personal devices can
be encrypted by an encryption key derived from one environmental matching key and several public
matching keys, where an environmental matching key is a key derived from user’s password and personal
device’s parameters, and the corresponding public matching key is generated by using elliptic
curve encryption based on the environmental matching key. Our analyses show that the EKSE is able
to resist machine-specific data leakage, insider threats, and impersonation attacks.