Sending Mobile Software Activation Code by SMS Using Steganography

Now we are able to offer numerous softwares for mobile phones after the advances in mobile phone industry. Most of these softwares should be bought in order that we can use them. Some of these softwares are sharewares and after buying them you have to insert an activation code given by the manufacturing company based on your mobile IMEI code in order to activate the software. In this paper a new method is introduced for sending the mobile software activation code by SMS (Short Message Service). In this method the activation code is hidden in an SMS picture message by steganography method and sent to the user. The software extracting the activation code from the picture and compare it with the code which is generated based on the user´s mobile phone IMEI code. If the codes are the same, the software is activated. Therefore the security of transferring the activation code is increased and if the SMS message is stolen, nobody can inform the activation code. This project is implemented in J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) language and tested on a Nokia N71 mobile phone.