SEVENCLICK
Mobile Technology Evangelists

Nowadays, data encryption has become mandatory, specially if there is money around. Moreover, if you are developing mobile applications you have to consider an additional risk: The loss or steal of the mobile device.

Although this point is fairly clear, encryption in mobile devices is not trivial due to hardware constraints and application size. What can we do? What is the middle solution between security and performance?

To make things clear, Masabi (former J2ME game company) has developed a multi-certificate encryption library (NIST certificated) whose ”weight” is only 3 kilobytes!! 

Here, you can see a comparation between the Masabi EncryMe library and its competitors:

Furthermore, EncryptME features some of the most advanced encryption and hashing algorithms available. These are some examples:

• AES with 256 bit keys (FIPS 197) Cert#593
• AES-based RNG (ANSI X9.31) Cert#338
• RSA with 1024 to 4096 bit keys (FIPS 186-2) Cert#271
• SHA1, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512 (FIPS 186-2) Cert#643″

Not only is the library, smaller and faster than the competition, it is also less stressful on network connections. With a single connection, a mobile user is capable of doing a payment. While on https/ssl, you need several connections for a secure channel to be established.

Of course nothing is perfect. Price and or licencing terms are unknown, being a key factor to its possible success.