IMPROVING THE SECURITY OF MOBILE-PHONE ACCESS TO REMOTE PERSONAL COMPUTERS
Alireza Pirayesh Sabzevar, João Pedro Sousa · 2008
Abstract: Cell phones are assuming an increasing role in personal computing tasks, but cell phone security has not evolved in parallel with this new role. In a class of systems that leverage cell phones to facilitate access to remote services, compromising a phone may provide the means to compromise or abuse the remote services. This paper presents the background to this class of systems, examines the threats they are exposed to, and discusses possible countermeasures. A concrete solution is presented, which is based on multi-factor authentication and an on-demand strategy for minimizing exposure. This solution is built on top of a representative off-the-shelf commercial product called SoonR. Rather than proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, this work enables end-users to manage the tradeoff between security assurances and the overhead of using the corresponding features. The contributions of this paper are a discussion of the problem and a set of guidelines for improving the design of security solutions for remote access systems. 1