Toward Flexible Security and Trust Hardware Structures for Mobile-Portable Systems

Mobile and portable computing devices are claiming an increasingly big part of recent and future IT user applications. However, in security demanding environments like financial, government or crisis management systems, the mobile, portable world is unable to provide a strong security infrastructure capable of supporting a high level of trust to related mobile applications. In this paper, we discuss the existing hardware attempts toward providing strong security and trust mechanisms for mobile-portable systems. We focus our analysis on the Trusted Computing Group initiative for mobile trust and highlight the design and implementation problems of such endeavor. We propose using hardware efficient cryptographic algorithms for the Hardware mobile trust environments capable of supporting flexible security protocols and suggest Elliptic Curve cryptography and associated Pairing Based protocols as the best approach toward this end.