PGP in Constrained Wireless Devices
by Michael Brown, Donny Cheung, Darrel Hankerson, Julio Lopez Hernandez, Michael Kirkup, Alfred Menezes
Usenix,
2004-08-14
Language:
English
Note: Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Security Symposium
Abstract
The market for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) is growing at a rapid pace. An increasing number of products, such as the PalmPilot, are adding wireless communications capabilities. PDA users are now able to send and receive email just as they would from their networked desktop machines. Because of the inherent insecurity of wireless environments, a system is needed for secure email communications. The requirements for the security system will likely be influenced by the constraints of the PDA, including limited memory, limited processing power, limited bandwidth, and a limited user interface.
This paper describes our experience with porting PGP to the Research in Motion (RIM) two-way pager, and incorporating elliptic curve cryptography into PGP's suite of public-key ciphers. Our main conclusion is that PGP is a viable solution for providing secure and interoperable email communications between constrained wireless devices and desktop machines.
