Trusted mobile computing: An overview of existing solutions

Nowadays, smartphones are able to process large amounts of data enabling the use of applications for personal or professional use. In these contexts, the smartphone needs to process, store and transfer sensitive data in a secure way. Encryption is a commonly used solution to enforce security but the encryption keys it relies on have also to be securely processed and stored. Several research works have investigated these issues and different solutions have been proposed. They can be classified into two main categories: hardware-based solutions (Secure Elements, Trusted Platform Module and Trusted Execution Environments) and software-based solutions (Virtualization Environments). This paper overviews/surveys these two categories highlighting their pros and cons. Examples of trusted computing applications are then provided for each category. Finally, a discussion is provided about trends and perspectives for trusted mobile computing.