Design and Development of Secure Mobile Communication over GSM Network Using Open Source Operating System (OS)

With the rapidly advancing technology of today, exchange of information and data is a very pertinent matter. The world has just recently witnessed the effects of information leakage through the issue of WikiLeaks. There are huge amounts of data being shared over different platforms nowadays. Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) is one of the most reliable platforms known to and used by almost all people in the world for text as well as voice communication. With the tools like Android Studio and NetBeans available, it is now possible to encrypt the text that has to be sent over the GSM, so that it can be decrypted at the other end of the communication path. However, the encryption and decryption of voice being transmitted over the GSM network still remains a question. In the domain of real time voice encryption, much of the work being carried out pertains to the voice being exchanged through the Internet Protocol. As compared to the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), voice over the GSM network has not seen much research work related to its security aspects. The purpose of this paper is to document the results of a project aimed at developing a platform for mobile phones in order to communicate over the GSM network in a secure manner. The most suitable method for achieving the above mentioned objective is to use an open source Operating System (OS), so that the source code is easily accessible and usable. In this paper, the Android OS will be under discussion, which is compatible with all the Android mobile phones. In this way, the maximum number of mobile phone users can be benefitted because Android cell phones are being widely used nowadays. The use of cryptographic algorithms for securing the voice communication over the GSM network is also a part of this paper. The work revolves around the Java programming language since the Android application development has been carried out in Java through the use of Android Studio. Also, NetBeans has been employed for developing algorithms for voice encryption. Keywords: Android Operating System; Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM); encryption; decryption; cryptography