Smartphone remote lock and data wipe system based on message authentication codes

Abstract

Smartphones provide portability and convenience to users by means of personal information profiles. However, when the phones are lost or stolen, security threats may cause personal information to be exposed. To resolve these problems, the network operator must provide users with remote-locking or wiping-out functions so that malicious users cannot use the mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a smartphone remote lock and data wipe scheme using password-based message authentication. The proposed scheme provides users with a mechanism for verifying the integrity of command messages so that malicious users cannot attack the device by intentionally transmitting lock or wipe commands. In addition, we show that the system is designed to fit in the standard SMS PDU, and we test the performance in terms of memory usage, authentication time, and bandwidth usage by implementing it on Android smartphones.