MobiCeal: Towards secure and practical plausibly deniable encryption on mobile devices

• Main Authors: CHANG, Bing, ZHANG, Fengwei, CHEN, Bo, LI, Yingjiu, ZHU, Wen Tao, TIAN, Yangguang, WANG, Zhan, CHING, Albert
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Fast Switching; Mobile Security; Multi snapshot Adversary; Plausibly Deniable Encryption; Side Channel Attack; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4100; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5103/viewcontent/mobiceal_dsn18_afv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We introduce MobiCeal, the first practical Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) system for mobile devices that can defend against strong coercive multi-snapshot adversaries, who may examine the storage medium of a user's mobile device at different points of time and force the user to decrypt data. MobiCeal relies on 'dummy write' to obfuscate the differences between multiple snapshots of storage medium due to existence of hidden data. By incorporating PDE in block layer, MobiCeal supports a broad deployment of any block-based file systems on mobile devices. More importantly, MobiCeal is secure against side channel attacks which pose a serious threat to existing PDE schemes. A proof of concept implementation of MobiCeal is provided on an LG Nexus 4 Android phone using Android 4.2.2. It is shown that the performance of MobiCeal is significantly better than prior PDE systems against multi-snapshot adversaries.