Analysis of Secure Key Storage Solutions on Android

Tim Cooijmans, Joeri de Ruiter, Erik Poll · 2014

Mobile phones are increasingly used for security sensitive activities such as online banking or mobile payments. This usually involves some cryptographic operations, and therefore introduces the problem of securely storing the corresponding keys on the phone. In this paper we evaluate the security provided by various options for secure storage of key material on Android, using either Android's service for key storage or the key storage solution in the Bouncy Castle library. The security provided by the key storage service of the Android OS depends on the actual phone, as it may or may not make use of ARM TrustZone features. Therefore we investigate this for different models of phones.

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