A Lightweight Approach to Protect Mobile Data

This paper proposes a lightweight approach for protecting data on mobile terminals by improving our former approach [Warabino et al., 2006]. In order for the data not to be compromised due to loss or theft, our approach prevents data leaks and allows the correct user 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. The master share is newly introduced to generate all the encryption keys for data on a mobile terminal. A user simply need reconstruct the master share onto a new mobile terminal to recover the environment of that lost. We confirmed the effectiveness of our approach through the implementation of both approaches onto a mobile phone.