Using the Smartphone as a Personal Information Security Center

With increasing power, the smartphone has become a new computing platform. A smartphone can efficiently execute a complex computing job, such as public-key encryption, which was usually run on workstations. This work presents a security management framework that uses a smartphone as a personal information security center (PISC) coordinating other devices of the user. The proposed framework is composed of two major parts: PISC key management and PISC security service coordination. In PISC key management, the smartphone manages the public key exchange between different users' smartphones. The key exchange utilizes a human-perceivable video channel to transfer keys and utilizes the phone camera to create an undeniable cryptographic nonce for key verification. A PISC phone also acts as a coordinator to provide keychain synchronization, authentication, and confidentiality services to all the user's devices. With the use of a PISC phone, a user can efficiently govern the security management of all her devices with little burden.