An extensible framework for efficient secure SMS

Nowadays, Short Message Service (SMS) still represents the most used mobile messaging service. SMS messages are used in many different application fields, even in cases where security features, such as authentication and confidentiality between the communicators, must be ensured. Unfortunately, the SMS technology does not provide a built-in support for any security feature. This work presents SEESMS (Secure Extensible and Efficient SMS), a software framework written in Java which allows two peers to exchange encrypted and digitally signed SMS messages. The communication between peers is secured by using public-key cryptography. The key-exchange process is implemented by using a novel and simple security protocol which minimizes the number of SMS messages to use. SEESMS supports the encryption of a communication channel through the ECIES and the RSA algorithms. The identity validation of the contacts involved in the communication is implemented through the RSA, DSA and ECDSA signature schemes. SEESMS is able to certify the phone number of the peers using the framework. Additional cryptosystems can be coded and added to SEESMS as plug-ins. Special attention has been devoted to the implementation of an efficient framework in terms of energy consumption and execution time. This efficiency is obtained in two steps. First, all the cryptosystems available in the framework are implemented using mature and fully optimized cryptographic libraries. Second, an experimental analysis was conducted to determine which combination of cryptosystems and security parameters were able to provide a better trade-off in terms of speed/security and energy consumption. This experimental analysis has also been useful to expose some serious performance issues affecting the cryptographic libraries which are commonly used to implement security features on mobile devices. © 2010 IEEE.