Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology
School of Information Technology
Department of Computer Science
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Short message service (SMS) is usually used to transport unclassified information, but with the rise of mobile commerce, it has become an integral tool for conducting business. However, SMS does not guarantee confidentiality and integrity of the message content. This research project was aimed at implementing a protocol called SMSSec that can be used to secure SMS communication sent by Java’s Wireless Messaging application programming interface (API). The physical limitations of the intended devices, such as mobile phones, made it necessary to develop a protocol that would make minimal use of computing resources. SMSSec has a two-phase protocol with the first handshake using asymmetric cryptography, which occurs only once, and a more efficient symmetric nth handshake, which is used more dominantly. What distinguishes this work from conventional protocols is the ability to perform the secure transmission with messages of a limited size. Performance analysis showed that the encryption speed on the mobile device is faster than the duration of the transmission. To achieve security in the mobile enterprise environment, this is deemed a very acceptable overhead. Furthermore, a simple mechanism is proposed that handles fault tolerance without additional overheads
Contact person: Prof JHP Eloff.
|
