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Apple Inc.: Data Security In Mobile Phones

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SECTION I INTRODUCTION With increasing computing power and pervasive network connectivity, we have seen significant proliferation in mobile handset usage and experienced mobile handset becoming more open and general-purpose computing environments [1]. More and more applications and services have been applied on mobile devices. Mobile handsets have become the platform carried lots of significant data. Eventually, these developments brought new security challenges, which cannot be satisfied with the conventional security mechanisms. Theft of phones has been a significant issue. Stolen mobile handsets have the risk of exposure of private information if they lack strong protection for access to stored information [2]. In addition, users …show more content…

So the users' data are stored in mobile terminal with plaintext format. Once the handset is lost, the content of private data will be very easily accessed by others. In this section, we analyze the data protection strategies supported by existing main mobile Operating Systems. A. Data Security in IOS Equipment A significant character of Apple Inc. mobile terminal equipments (e.g. iphone, ipad) is that storage card is not supported. The storage part is closed in these equipments. Apple IOS devices design a series of ways for data security [5]: Provides hardware encrypting and decrypting modules with 256 bits AES algorithm. Encryption is mandatory set and cannot be cancelled by users; Supports remote information clearing. Once a device is lost or stolen, equipment owner can trigger data clearing instruction remotely, which will delete all of data and reset the equipment; Supports local information clearing. If user set this option opened, after 10 times of inputing wrong passwords, the equipment will delete all data. This mechanism can prevent enumeration attacking. IOS devices greatly improve user's data security through the above mechanisms. But these mechanisms also face some threats which mainly come from that the security mechanism cannot be correctly

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