The bright side arguments for the coming smartphones crypto war: The added value of device encryption

摘要

The mobile ecosystem on top of the telephone networks and the Internet is a dominant computing paradigm and the most growing and rapidly changing technology nowadays. Many works regarding its security and trustworthiness aspects have been conducted, and many specific solutions have been proposed. Recently, as a reaction to surveillance, smartphone systems providers have included encryption on the phones. This action immediately triggered government law enforcement agencies to criticize it. This is reminiscent of the 90's cryptowars as the Internet became popular. It is therefore expected that a policy debate and policy decision making process is to take place for a while now. To engage in a policy debate it is important to understand the role of encryption availability at the hands of the smartphone user, and understand its bright side (advantages) and dark side (threats), and compare the two. Without evaluating the advantages of encryption on the phone, the policy debate will miss important components (and may be then reduced to a ???shouting match??? between opposing teams). This work is a step in this direction, elaborating on the bright side. The methodology we employ involves surveying a wide range of security concerns and possible readily available existing solutions to them, and a differential analysis of what can be done with cryptography on the phone vs. what can be done without it. This cumulative advantage is the positive value of encryption at the hands of the smartphone user. We hope this work will encourage further investigations of this nature using this methodology (we do not claim to be fully exhaustive and have all analysis components right), since we believe this debate is possibly crucial stage in the mobile phone evolution.