Comparative Analysis of Selected Encryption Algorithms to Secure SMS on Android Operating Systems
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Date
2020
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Abstract
This work investigates and analyzes the performance of popular cryptographic schemes on Android-based mobile
devices over varying input data scenarios. The cryptographic operations of key generation, message encryption
and decryption are experimented and the time it takes to execute these operations are used as performance metric
of cryptographic algorithms. Short Message Service (SMS) is one of the oldest and most popular non-voice
information transfer methods over mobile communication systems. However, exchange of information via SMS is
not secure because it can be easily intercepted. To prevent unauthorized access to messages, cryptography is
usually applied to render the transferred information into a format that will be indiscernible to others. To do this,
cryptographic keys need to be generated, message needs to be encrypted before sending and the received
encrypted message is then decrypted. Three symmetric ciphers and two asymmetric ciphers were selected and
chosen using purposive sampling method as criteria. The performance of the selected cryptographic algorithms
on cryptographic key generation, SMS encryption and decryption was tested in a virtual environment using some
comprehensive sets of Android codes. These cryptographic actions are generally considered to be highly
resource-demanding, particularly for resource-constrained devices like mobile phones. The results show Blowfish
as the most efficient in terms of key generation and decryption time, while the RSA is the most efficient in
encryption time.