A secure server-based pseudorandom number generator protocol for mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices play an essential role in telecommunication era. The need for securing this type of communications is inevitable. The majority of security and cryptographic protocols require unpredictable random numbers. However, mobile computing devices have difficulty in generating random numbers due to constraints in terms of power and computing resources. We propose a novel pseudorandom number generator protocol to enable secure communication between mobile devices and a trusted centralized server. The trusted centralized server generates qualified random numbers based on the location of mobile device specified by geographical latitude and longitude. We evaluate the quality of generated random bit sequences through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests, and compare them with other methods in regard to security and quality of generated random numbers. The quality of the randomness of generated numbers is comparable to that from the existing methods and more superior than them found in use in mobile devices today.