Principles of SMS protection

If SMS messages are to be a reliable and secure means of communication, several requiremens must be fulfilled in order to thwart the abovementioned risks.

  1. They must be secured against wiretapping (reading) by a third person.
  2. They must be secured against modification (any change, even senseless one, must be detected at arrival).
  3. Sender of the message must be certain.
  4. Saved messages must be protected from reading when the phone falls into adversary's hands.
  5. 1.List of contacts must be protected as well.

Thanks to current state-of-the-art in science and technology, such objectives are possible to meet in the world of mobile communication.

Cryptography is a part of mathematical science studying protection of information from unauthorized access. At first, cryptographic results were available only to the military. However, in the 1970s, rapid development of digital communication led to rise in nonmilitary cryptography, which protects data in everyday life. Nowadays, cryptography is widely used in protection of many secrets, including internet banking (transfers of billions of dollars are protected using cryptography every day), access to private databases and personal communication (like PGP).

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