Secure data storage for Java ME-based mobile data collection systems

Abstract

The falling price of mobile devices with high mobile subscriber penetration rate provides an opportunity to create an affordable mobile solution to disseminate and gather health related information in remote areas in a real time. These solutions come with data security and privacy challenges, and many existing mobile data collection systems (MDCS) do not systematically address very important security issues which are critical when dealing with sensitive and private health information. Insecure storage, in particular, is one of the major challenges in mobile security. In this paper, building on our previous work, we present a solution to storage security issues for data collection systems running on the Java ME platform. Our secure storage scheme is flexible enough to be integrated in existing mobile client applications without requiring significant changes, and offers a cost-effective way for ensuring data protection and authorization, account and data recovery mechanisms, and multiuser management.We use openXdata as our reference MDCS and the secure solution has been successfully integrated and evaluated in a prototype system.