ÉLAN: Decentralized mobile Backup Agent

Abstract

Mobile devices primarily including Android mobile devices contain a lot of sensitive and personal data on them. Naturally, a mobile OS including Android has several techniques to preserve privacy and protect sensitive data on mobile devices. Consequently, data backup is one of the most useful and desirable functionalities on Android (Bai et al., 2016). Backup can be a vital function, since hardware failures, software errors and user errors can occur leading to loss of important and sensitive data. However, the security aspect of sensitive and personal data is not still fully addressed. Besides, you are still relying on google cloud storage or another 3rd party cloud storage, who can easily tamper with your data. Moreover, cloud storage vendors distribute file duplicates throughout numerous data centres to avoid data disruption, blockchain-based solutions will avoid such data disruption by default, additionally by using less effort. Mobile phone (Android/IOS) users want a data backup application that preserves data security and data persistence for their sensitive and personal data. Despite the attempts taken by several researchers/software developers, it is evident that they were not able to propose an ideal Mobile backup to meet the requirements. Consequently, this research will investigate in improving data security and data persistence of Mobile data backup agents. The outcome of this research will be used to build a blockchain-based data backup agent on Android. Élan: Decentralized Android Backup Agent appears to be the first research attempt to relate blockchain technology to a Mobile backup application for sensitive data. All the other existing applications have concentrated on improving data security and data persistence by improving the encryption technique or by using a more secure cloud storage platform. Implementing a blockchain-based decentralized mobile backup agent allows us to eliminate the dependency of users on cloud server vendors and can count on the fact that blockchains are tamper-free (Zyskind, Nathan and Pentland, 2015). Furthermore, the immutability feature (Zheng et al., 2017) of the blockchain will also contribute to the fact that the data cannot be deleted or lost.