SSMS - A Secure SMS Messaging Protocol for the M-payment Systems

Abstract: The GSM network with the greatest worldwide number of users, succumbs to several security vulnerabilities. The short message service (SMS) is one of its superior and well-tried services with a global availability in the GSM networks. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a new secure application layer protocol, called SSMS, to efficiently embed the desired security attributes in the SMS messages to be used as a secure bearer in the m-payment systems. SSMS efficiently embeds the confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation in the SMS messages. It provides an elliptic curve-based public key solution that uses public keys for the secret key establishment of a symmetric encryption. It also provides the attributes of public verification and forward secrecy. It efficiently makes the SMS messaging suitable for the m-payment applications where the security is the great concern.