Secure Data Sharing in Mobile Environments

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach for secure data sharing on mobile terminals with members of a particular group. To avoid the data being compromised due to loss or theft, this approach prevents data leakage, while allowing the correct members to recover the data to a new mobile terminal thanks to cooperation between a mobile terminal and a network server. The fundamental concept used to achieve data security involves applying data encryption and secret sharing of the encryption key. In addition, this approach newly introduces a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and threshold cryptography. The approach also combines the use of a data protection approach, based on a secret sharing scheme, in order to achieve an efficient data reading process. Once one of the members reads the data, he/she need not use threshold cryptography to reconstruct the encrypted key, but instead uses a secret sharing scheme. This paper confirms the potential of this approach via the prototype implementation onto a mobile phone.