A comparison of TCP and SSL for mobile security

Abstract

In recent years, the use of mobile device is growing fast. The prevalence of mobile devices and the rapid growth of mobile threats have resulted in a shortage of personnel trained to handle mobile security As mobile platforms grow increasingly in popularity, so do the incentives for attackers. Mobile security, which is emerging security of network and message, is seen as a most important field in the future of mobile development. This paper presents the comparison between Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection and TCP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) in Android device, aiming at finding more security communicated method when surfing the Internet. In experiments, TCPDump is used for capture the traffic packages during the communication between client and server. Based on our experiments, we make a conclusion that TCP with SSL is more secure, compared with TCP connection which provides reliable, ordered, error-check delivery of a stream between server and client. Due to encrypt and decrypt data, transmission speed is more slow than normal. In the future, we will explore how to increase transmission speed.