Evaluation of Cryptographic Capabilities for the Android Platform

Future networks will be formed by millions of devices, many of them mobile, sharing information and running applications. Android is currently the most widely used operating system in smartphones, and it is becoming more and more popular in other devices. Providing security to these mobile devices and applications is a must for the proper deployment of future networks. For this reason, this paper studies the cryptographic structure and built-in tools in Android, and shows that the operating system has been specially designed for plugging-in external cryptographic modules. We conclude that the best option for providing cryptographic capabilities is using these external modules. We show the existent options and compare some features, like licensing, source code availability and price. We define some requirements, evaluate each module, and provide guidelines for developers who want to use properly security primitives.