2013 International Conference on Advanced Computer Science Applications and Technologies

SMS Encryption using 3D-AES Block Cipher on Android Message Application

Suriyani Ariffin
Faculty of Computer and Mathematical
Sciences
Universiti Teknologi MARA
Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
[email protected]

Ramlan Mahmod
Faculty of Computer Science and
Information Technology
Universiti Putra Malaysia
Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
[email protected]

Abstract Short Message Service (SMS) is a very popular

way for mobile phone and portable device users to send and
receive simple text messages. Unfortunately, SMS is does not
offer a secure environment for confidential data during
transmission. This paper deals with an SMS encryption for
mobile communication on Android message application. The
transmission of an SMS in mobile communication is not secure,
therefore it is desirable to secure SMS by additional encryption.
In this paper, there is proposed the use of 3D-AES block cipher
symmetric cryptography algorithm for SMS transfer securing.
From the experiment, the 3D-AES has low encryption time
when message size is more then 256 bits. It can be indicate that
SMS encryption application using the 3D-AES block cipher
will be proposed running after 256 bits.
Keywords-component; 3D-AES,
encryption, mobile application

I.

SMS,

block

Ratini Rahmat, 2Nuzul Annisa Idris

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical
Sciences
Universiti Teknologi MARA
Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
1
[email protected],
2
[email protected]

Section IV is present the description of design and

implementation of the application for mobile phones, which
encrypts and signs SMS using a symmetric 3D-AS block
cipher. Section V analyses the SMS Encryption and Section
VI describes conclusion and future extension of the
application.
II.

RELATED WORK

The field of cryptography [15] can be divided into

several techniques of study. There are two types of
techniques in cryptography which are asymmetric key
algorithm and symmetric key algorithm. Asymmetric key
algorithm or sometimes called public key algorithm is
usually based on complex mathematical problems.
Symmetric key algorithm can be broadly grouped into block
ciphers and stream ciphers [16]. Other symmetric key
algorithms are cryptographic hash functions and Message
Authentication Codes (MACs).

cipher,

INTRODUCTION

SMS is a text messaging service component of phone,

web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized
communications protocols that allow the exchange of short
text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices.
Users can used SMS to send or receive from a single person,
or several persons, personal messages, email notifications,
information services [1], school activity alerts, notification
from teacher, job dispatches, and also stock alerts. With
these usable application, SMS is now more and more
common among mobile phone users. However the security
issue [12] of SMSs is still an open challenging task.

Figure 1. Diagram of symmetric block cipher

The symmetric key block cipher technique operates on

the same block or fixed-length groups of bits. The algorithm
is illustrated in Fig. 1. The encryption function in (1),
denoted as E, is a process of enciphering information called
Plaintext, denoted as P, using some secret codes called secret
Key, denoted as K, into an unreadable form called
Ciphertext, denoted as C. The P, as it goes through each
round of the cipher, is referred to as the cipher-state, denoted
as F.

SMS is now a very common communication tool. The

security protection of SMS messages is not yet that
sophisticated and difficult to implement in practice. The
confidentiality and integrity mechanisms are only specified
as optional security measures that can be made available, but
they are not mandatory requirements for SMS system
implementation [14]. In this paper, there proposed the use of
symmetric cryptography for SMS transfer securing.

Decryption function in (2) is the inverse process of

encryption, denoted as E-1, where the ciphertext is
deciphered to readable information using the same secret
key. The encryption process can be described as :

Rest of paper is organized as follows. Section II discuss

related works about encryption, block cipher algorithm and
current development of securing SMS transmitted message.
Section III describes the 3D-AES block cipher algorithm.
978-1-4799-2758-6/13 $31.00 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ACSAT.2013.68

 () = 
310

(1)

and decryption process can be describe as :

 () = 

(2)

In the literature as shown in Tab. 1, many authors have

used different cryptography algorithms in the SMS
encryption application to provide confidentiality in sending
and receiving messages. Even though there are several
authors (2 out of 8) used DES, 3DES and AES block cipher
algorithms in their works but most of these works are
asymmetric key encryption techniques. Therefore it is
advisable that can develop SMS Encryption using
symmetric key encyption.
Table 1. Review on SMS Encryption

Author
Lisonek & Drahansky
[17]
Albuja &Carrera [18]
Toolani & Shirazi [19]
Zhao et al [20]
Harb et al [2]
Sonam [3]
Hosain et al [4]
Kuate et al [5]

Algorithm
RSA
DES, 3DES, AES and RSA
ECDLP
identity-based
3DES
elliptic curve
A5
SMSsec

Figure 2. The structure of 3D-AES block cipher.

A detailed description of all the layers of 3D-AES block

cipher follows:
x 
is a plaintext for ith slice at nth cube.
x 
is a ciphertext for ith slice at nth cube.
x  is a rotation key .
x   is the output of nth cube from arranging
function at rotation key Q.
x 
is a encryption function for ith slice.
x 
 is a output block of encryption function for
ith slice at cipher state for nth cube in round r.
x   is the sub key used in round r.
x  is key scheduling function.
x 
 is a output block of linear transformation
function for ith slice at Q rotation key at nth cube.
x 
is a nonlinear transformation of the ith slice at
round function .


x  is a rotation function at arranging function of
th
i slice and q degree at nth cube.
x 
is a linear transformation of the ith slice at round
function.
x 
is a XOR operation.

Owning from suggestion of Garza-Saldana & DiazPerez [6] that symmetric encryption could provide
confidentiality to SMS, this paper perform an evaluation of
three block cipher symmetric encryption techniques. This is
done in order to find the most suitable block cipher
symmetric encryption technique for securing SMS
transmitted messages.
III.

3D-AES BLOCK CIPHER

The 3D-AES block cipher [7] is based on the AES block

cipher [8][9] which is a key-alternating block cipher,
composed of rotation key function, minimum 3 iterations of
round function and key mixing operations. The round
function consists of non linear substitution function,
permutation function and transposition function. A block
diagram of the 3D-AES block cipher is given in Fig. 2 in the
form of 4 x 16 bytes. The original message is called the
plaintext, denoted Pi, where i = {0, 1, 2, 3}. The unreadable
form is called the ciphertext, denoted by Ci, where i = {0, 1,
2, 3}. The secret master key is denoted by K. The
transformation of P into C is called encryption and the
reverse process is called decryption. The P, as it goes
through each round of the cipher, is referred to as the cipher
state, denoted as F. Note that, the output cipher state, F of
the key mixing layer of round r1 forms the input cipher state
to the next round r. The 3D-AES block cipher is improved
confusion performance [10] of round transformation.

The 3D-AES block cipher identified the encryption and

decryption functions. When r = 3, the output cipher state is
the ciphertext. The third round of the 3D-AES block cipher
operates on plaintext size of 16 x 4 bytes to produce an
output ciphertext 64 bytes. The secret key size required by
the 3D-AES block cipher is 16 bytes. All the operations in
the 3D-AES block cipher are performed in the finite field of
order 28, denoted by GF(28).

311

This immune-inspired block cipher adopted amino acid

sequences model that can be rotate with a different angle
[11]. However for the purpose of evaluation and testing the
implementation of the 3D-AES block cipher, every Slice of
the Cube module will be rotate at 3D-SliceRotate module
implementation in four types of angel and clockwise


rotation only, which is denoted as  . The q degree is
th
based on the rotation angel for every i Slice where i = {1,
2, 3, 4} and q = {0, 1, 2, 3}. There is no rotation slice for
the first slice, second will be rotate in 900, third slice will be
rotate in 1800 and fourth slice will be rotate in 2700.
IV.

Receiver

Message
Message
(plantext)
(plantext) and
and
Secret
Secret Key
Key

Message
Message
(plantext)
(plantext)

3D-AES
3D-AES block
block cipher
cipher
(encrypted
(encry
r pted function)
f nction)
fu

3D-AES
3D-AES block
block cipher
cipher
(decrypted
(decry
r pted function)
f nction)
fu

Send
Send encrypted
encry
r pted SMS
SMS

Message
Message
(ciphertext)
(ciphertext)
and
and Secret
Secret Key
Key

DESIGN OF SMS ENCRYPTION

A. Programming Platforms for Mobile Phones

The SMS Encryption was developed for evaluating two
symmetric encryption techniques which is AES and 3DAES. It has been developed using a Java Programming
Language, Java Micro Edition (Java ME) which is produced
by Sun Microsystems. Almost all mobile phones include
this programming platform. The Eclipse IDE is the essential
starting point for Mobile developers, including a Java IDE,
C language support, a Git client, XML Editor and Mylyn.

GSM
GSM

Mobile device
(send encrypted message)

V.

RESULT DISCUSSION

This application was tested on Android operating

system, v4.1.2 (Jelly Bean), Cortex-A5 processor mobile
phone running at 1 GHz speed, with 4 GB internal Memory
and 786 MB RAM. The performance data were collected by
applying 100 sequences of random SMS message or
plaintext for each sizes on the phone to get the encryption
and decryption time for both algorithms. The AES block
cipher has a fixed block length of 128 bits and a key length
of 128, 192, or 256 bits. It can be specified with block and
key sizes in any multiple 35 of 32 bits with a minimum of
128 bits. The AES block cipher has 10 rounds for 128-bit
keys, 12 rounds for 192-bit keys, and 14 rounds for 256-bit
keys. The experiment only taking into consideration on 128bit-keys only as well as 3D-AES block cipher.

Mobile device
(received encrypted message)

SMS Center

Received
Received encrypted
encry
r pted SMS
SMS

Figure 4. SMS Encryption

B. Design flow
In this SMS Encryption is used a standardized facility
defined as part as of the Global System for Mobile
Communications (GSM) series of standards [13] as shown
in Fig. 3. Any message, sent via SMS, is not directly
delivered to its destination, but it is stored into an SMS
Center (SMSC) after passing through a Mobile Switching
Center (MSC), which has the important role of message
routing, according to the information provided by Home
Location Register (HLR) and the Visitor Location Register
(VLR)
.

Mobile
Switching
Center

Sender

Encryption time is the time taken to transform the SMS

plaintext into cipher text. For each key size of same
algorithm, random SMS message of different bit sizes was
encrypted. The average of the encryption time is calculated
using the formula in (3) and the results are tabulated in Tab.
2.

Mobile
Switching
Center



 =

1
 

(3)



where n is total number of encrypted message sequences, ei

is the consecutive encryption time and Et is the average
encryption time.

Figure 3. SMS achitecture

The SMS Encryption application works only with SMS,

which is encrypted in the first step, digitally signed in the
second step and sent in the last step.

312

Table 2. Encryption time in milliseconds

Plaintext size
32
64
128
256
512
1024

AES
45
73
145
298
412
872

use a same key size to achieve high security, it can be

concluded that the 3D-AES block cipher is the most cost
effective algorithm for SMS encryption as compared with
the AES block cipher.

3D-AES
243
243
243
243
243
486

VI.

The application of SMS Encryption of 3D-AES block

cipher on android application has been designed and
implemented. The application is running in the mobile
phone and does not require any additional encryption
devices. The result showed that suitable and easy to
implement in mobile device for the proposed scheme. With
the increasing use of SMS for communication and
information exchange, care should be taken when sensitive
information is transmitted using SMS. Users should be aware
that SMS messages might be subject to interception.
Solutions such as encrypted SMS should be considered if
there is a need to send sensitive information via SMS.

Tab. 2 indicates that encryption time and the plaintext

size are related. The rise in plaintext size of the AES block
cipher increases the encryption time. Even though the 3DAES block cipher has a high encryption time when the
plaintext size between 32 bit to 128 bits compared to the
AES block cipher, the 3D-AES has low encryption time
when plaintext size more then 256 bits. It can be indicate
that SMS encryption using the 3D-AES block cipher will
be proposed after 256 bits. The encryption time of below
512 on the 3D-AES does not change because the 3D-AES is
512 bit in block.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by two grant schemes. First grant
scheme is from the Fundamental Research (FRGS) provided
by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, under the
Grant Number FRGS/1/11/SG/UPM/02/4. The second grant
scheme is from the Research Intensive Faculty (RIF)
provided by Universiti Teknologi MARA, under Grant
Number 600-RMI/DANA 5/3/RIF (409/2012).

Decryption time is the time taken to transform the SMS

cipherext into plaintext. For each key size of same
algorithm, random SMS message of different bit sizes was
decrypted. The average of the decryption time is calculated
using the formula in (4) and the results are tabulated in Tab.
3.

REFERENCES



1
 =
 !

(4)



where n is total number of decrypted message sequences, ci

is the consecutive decryption time and Ct is the average
decryption time.
Table 3. Decryption time in milliseconds

Ciphertext size
32
64
128
256
512
1024

AES
47
71
142
287
409
821

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

3D-AES
241
241
241
241
241
483

Tab. 3 indicates that decryption time and the ciphertext

size are related. The rise in plaintext size of the AES block
cipher increases the decryption time. Even though the 3DAES block cipher has a high decryption time when the
ciphertext size between 32 bit to 128 bits compared to the
AES block cipher, the 3D-AES has low decryption time
when plaintext size more then 256 bits. It can be indicate
that SMS decryption using the 3D-AES block cipher will
be proposed after 256 bits. Since the 3D-AES and AES have

313

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