m-PKI: A Generic Model of Applying Public Key Infrastructure in to Mobile Phones

Abstract

The world is now becoming digitalized and many new technologies introduced in every day. One of the fasted growing areas in this digitalized world is mobile computing and mobile phone manufacturing. These mobile phones now empow- ered with many features that exist in personal computer in few years back. As mobile phone usage becomes popular attacks on mobile phone communication and stored data has been increased. Many organizations come up with various mechanisms to counter these at- tacks. The most popular mechanism is the use of password or PIN to authen- ticate the user which is used by many nancial companies. Also symmetric key cryptography has been used to secure the mobile phone communication. But these methods has inherent drawbacks, thus requirement of Public Key Infrastructure on mobile phones is a must. We have developed a Public Key Infrastructure that suitable to operate on mobile phone environment. This solution provides the new certi cate manage- ment protocol for mobile phones and also provides Application Programming Interface for application level programmers to use this infrastructure to imple- ment security on their applications. The API provides Encryption/Decryption and Sign/Veri cation facilities to user level applications. The certi cate man- agement protocol provides user to obtain a digital certi cate, fetch CA server certi cate and fetch and end entity certi cate. The validation of the certi cate also performed by our protocol. We have tested this protocol and API with a sample application developed by us, and we have evaluated our solution by performance evaluation. We have used time taken by di erent functions to evaluate our solution and the results show that the solution can be used in real time applications.