Secure data storage for mobile data collection systems

Abstract

Wireless network infrastructures, notably cellular networks, are becoming a vital element for exchanging electronic data in low income countries. Several key sectors are already leveraging on cellular networks: mobile financial transactions have already gained an enormous success, and the health care sector is also aiming to tackle outstanding challenges like providing basic health care services to remote communities, by using cheap mobile devices. So far, more than ten mobile based health care services are deployed in low-income countries. Among those, mobile data collection is the one used to replace traditional paper form based data collection with electronic digital forms by the use of Mobile Data Collection Systems (MDCS). However, although such systems are often used to collect sensitive health-related data, critical issues like security and privacy of personal data have not been systematically addressed. Particularly, very little has been done to protect data while stored on the phone. This paper focuses on low budget mobile phones with low hardware and software specification, and proposes adequate secure solutions for data storage protection. Our secure storage scheme is flexible enough to be integrated in existing mobile client applications. The solution has been extensively tested and integrated into a production MDCS. For this work, we collaborated with the open-source mobile data collection project, openXdata.