Citation
Alomari, Mohammad Ahmed Mohammad
(2017)
An embedded database design and implementation of a parallel IEEE XTS storage encryption for mobile devices.
Doctoral thesis, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Abstract
The ubiquity and huge proliferation of mobile and handheld devices, such as
smartphones and tablets, are globally undeniable where Google’s Android operating
system dominates the largest share of mobile platforms in the market. The vast
spread and increased capabilities of these devices have come with major challenges
to mobile security and data confidentiality. Every year different threats against
sensitive data resting inside the storage of these mobile devices continue to rise
sharply. Encryption might be the most efficient technique to ensure storage
confidentiality; however it comes with great impact on these small gadgets which
suffer from lack of resources such as processing power and battery. Performance is
also a major concern for implementing security solutions, such as full storage
encryption, inside mobile devices. A security solution might not be welcomed by
consumers if it causes tangible performance degradation. With the wide spread of
multi-core processors in current smart gadget devices, parallelization is no more
luxury and can be used to enhance encryption performance in mobile gadgets
significantly.
This study focuses on evaluating and enhancing the performance of data storage
encryption inside mobile devices. In this thesis, a parallel encryption system for the
protection of sensitive data stored inside Android-based mobile devices is
developed and successfully implemented. To ensure higher security level, the
developed system is implemented using the NIST-certified XTS-AES block
encryption algorithm. Other storage encryption algorithms, i.e. XTS-Twofish and
XTS-RC6, have also been implemented in both serial and parallel designs and then
evaluated. Overheads occurring due to parallel implementations have been
identified and successfully mitigated to achieve proper performance speedup. Since the most user sensitive data are residing inside persisting databases, an SQLite
implementation of the parallel XTS-AES system is proposed. This developed
parallel SQLite-XTS system encrypts data stored in databases transparently on-thefly
without the need for any user intervention. To design the parallel computation
side of the proposed system and improve the overall system performance, a specific
version of OpenMP API is integrated inside the architecture of targeted Android
platform. This allows the developed encryption system to exploit the multi-core
commodity processors, equipped with current mobile devices, in order to enhance
performance. Different serial and parallel experiments have been conducted on an
Android testbed device, where performance analysis and comparisons of different
SQLite implementations have been carried out.
During the file-based experiments, the parallel XTS-AES has shown a performance
speedup of 1.71 with 86% efficiency faster than its serial counterpart; with higher
encryption throughput achieved in the testbed device up to 8290 KB/s and 11380
KB/s when using XTS-AES and XTS-RC6 ciphers respectively. Additionally, the
developed parallel SQLite-XTS system have been successfully implemented and
integrated into the mobile testbed device. To assess the performance and feasibility
of this system, it has been compared with three other SQLite implementations, i.e.
Plain SQLite, Serial XTS SQLite, and SQLCipher-CBC. Results show that the
developed parallel SQLite system has reduced the overhead of database encryption
from 30.8%, with serial implementation, up to 17.8% when parallel SQLite is used.
That provides the developed system with an efficiency of 73% compared to serial
counterpart. These results clarify that the developed SQLite system introduces
significant performance improvement compared to other implementations.
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