Research Paper on Secure Data Synchronization in Android Applications Using End-to-End Encryption

Author

Dhananjay Shet


Abstract

 The increasing use of Android applications for storing and synchronizing personal, financial, organizational, and application-specific information has created significant requirements for protecting data during both local storage and synchronization. Conventional synchronization architectures generally rely on server-side security and transport-layer encryption, which can protect data while it is transmitted but may still expose plaintext data to the synchronization server. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) addresses this limitation by ensuring that sensitive application data is encrypted on the Android device before synchronization and decrypted only by an authorized client.

This research proposes an Android-based secure data synchronization model using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), specifically AES-256 in Galois/Counter Mode (GCM). AES is standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and supports 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys. AES-GCM additionally provides authenticated encryption, allowing confidentiality and integrity to be protected together.

The study concludes that AES-256-GCM combined with Android Keystore provides a practical foundation for secure Android data synchronization. However, encryption alone does not constitute complete E2EE: secure key generation, key storage, device enrollment, key recovery, synchronization integrity, and protection against key loss must also be addressed.


Keywords

Android Security; End-to-End Encryption; AES-256; AES-GCM; Android Keystore; Data Synchronization; Mobile Security; Cryptographic Key Management; Confidentiality; Data Integrity.


DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23554859


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References


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