Privacy-Preserving Applications on Smartphones

Smartphones are becoming some of our most trusted computing devices. People use them to store highly sensitive information including email, passwords, financial accounts, and medical records. These properties make smartphones an essential platform for privacy-preserving applications. To date, this area remains largely unexplored mainly because privacy-preserving computation protocols were thought to be too heavyweight for practical applications, even for standard desktops. We propose using smartphones to perform secure multi-party computation. The limitations of smartphones provide a number of challenges for building such applications. In this paper, we introduce the issues that make smartphones a unique platform for secure computation, identify some interesting potential applications, and describe our initial experiences creating privacy-preserving applications on Android devices.