A New Approach to Mobile Backup And Restore

to my parents because an example is worth a thousand words Smartphone owners use to save always more information, and more impor-tant data into the internal memory of their devices. Mobile devices are prone to be lost, stolen or broken; this causes the loss of all the information contained in it if these data are not backed up. While many solutions for making back-ups and restoring data are known for servers and desktops, mobile devices pose several challenges, mainly due to the plethora of devices, vendors, oper-ating systems and versions available in the mobile market. In this thesis, we propose a new backup and restores approach for mobile devices, which helps to reduce the effort in saving and restoring personal data and migrate from a device to another. Our approach is platform independent: in particular, we present some prototypes based on different mobile operating systems: Google Android, Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and Symbian S60. The approach grants the security of the information backed up and restored using novel cryptographic techniques optimized for mobile. Another feature of our approach lies in the capability of offering additional services to the final user or to administrator of the system. As an example, for users, we provide a service enabling the shar-ing of information in mobile devices among a group of selected persons. This can be useful in many situations e.g., in creating a mobile business network among a group of people. For administrators we offer a social network extrac-tor which, starting from information contained into the smartphone and data publicly available on the web generates a social graph of the backup network. This can be useful in situations like creating teams into an enterprise.