Securing Mobile Messaging on Android

As the sensitive use of SMS grows every day, researchers have been devising ways to secure it. However, some of the algorithms proposed by researchers or solutions that have flooded the market have not fully aided SMS security, making it difficult to choose appropriate solutions that align with users' needs, which is key to protecting sensitive information. Finding the right solution to secure SMS is still a problem today in sectors like banking, E-commerce and even individual usage. The idea of using encryption is not new, but employing the right solution to secure SMS is yet to be achieved by all. In this thesis, we analyzed and evaluated AES, Camellia and RC6 algorithms for securing SMS on Android platform and over the network. A comparative study was carried out on these algorithms using performance metrics: Encryption, decryption, and key generation time. The result shows that Camellia with key sizes 128, 192 and 256 bits was the fastest to encrypt a text while RC6 with key sizes 128, 192 and 256 bits was the fastest to decrypt a text. Camellia and RC6 with key sizes 128, 192 and 256 bits generate keys at almost the same speed. AES of key sizes 128, 192 and 256 bits was slower in generating keys, encrypting and decrypting a message when compared to Camellia and RC6. The findings from this research support the idea of using Camellia and RC6 more often for SMS encryption.