Title
Remotely wiping sensitive data on stolen smartphones
Abstract
Smartphones are playing an increasingly important role in personal life and carrying massive private data. Unfortunately, once the smartphones are stolen, all the sensitive information, such as contacts, messages, photos, credit card information and passwords, may fall into the hands of malicious people. In order to protect the private data, remote deletion mechanism is required to allow owners to wipe the sensitive data on the stolen phone remotely. Existing remote deletion techniques rely on the availability of either WiFi for Internet connection or SIM card for cellular network connection; however, these requirements may not be satisfied when the phones are stolen by some sophisticated adversaries. In this paper, we propose a new remote deletion mechanism that allows the phone owner to delete the private data remotely even if the WiFi is disabled and the SIM card is unplugged. The basic idea is to use emergency call mechanisms to establish a communication connection with a service provider to verify the state of the phone and perform remote deletion. We present a case study of our mechanism with the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) network.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2590296.2590318
ASIACCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
emergency call,mobile device security,remote deletion,security and protection
Internet privacy,Computer science,Computer security,Service provider,Credit card,Phone,Password,Cellular network,Information sensitivity,Internet access,Subscriber identity module
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.55
5
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xingjie Yu181.66
Zhan Wang240.55
Kun Sun314212.80
Wen Tao Zhu439428.62
Neng Gao5173.46
Jiwu Jing623439.34