CI: A new encryption mechanism for instant messaging in mobile devices

Instant Messaging in mobile devices can be considered one of the most used services in mobile communications. Security properties such as integrity and confidentiality must be maximized. This paper proposes a new symmetric encryption mechanism for instant text messaging in mobile devices. Our mechanism uses a sequence of prime numbers obtained from a bi-dimensional matrix and a secret key for the encryption process. The proposed solution has been compared with other well-known symmetric and asymmetric algorithms such as DES, AES, RSA, MD2, MD5, SHA. Results show that symmetrical mechanisms are more efficient for instant messaging and that our mechanism is suitable for the encryption of instant text messaging in mobile devices due to its low complexity, performance, robustness and ease of implementation.