Short Message Service (SMS) security solution for mobile devices

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the security of Short Message Service (SMS) and the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) network and the use of encryption to protect SMS messages. A detailed study of the GSM network and SMS protocol, and encryption schemes was conducted to understand the properties of different encryption schemes and their applicability to SMS messages. An experiment was conducted to measure the actual performance of various encryption schemes on a modern smart phone device. An analysis of the encryption scheme properties and the performance measurement was then conducted to select a suitable scheme for SMS encryption. The selected scheme was implemented in the form of a Secure SMS Chat application to validate the viability of the selected encryption scheme. Potential applications of secure SMS in military settings are also discussed.