Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to understand the
security implications of MDCS working with constrained environmental
and technological resources, and identify suitable
solutions. We do this by first presenting a security review of openXdata and similar systems in Section II, where we look
at whether basic security concerns have been addressed in a
satisfactory manner. Then, in Section III, we discuss the main
constraints that remote data collection is subject to, especially
when deployed in low-budget settings in low-income countries,
and what specific security issues this might entail. Using
these observations as baseline, in Section IV we evaluate some
available solutions that can be used to secure the mobile client
in these systems and discuss how suitable they actually are.
Based on all the above, we propose an alternative solution
specifically designed for constrained MDCS in Section V, that
can provide the following: local and end-to-end authentication,
support for multiple users per mobile device, secure storage,
key distribution and management, data integrity, and secure
communication, even if HTTPS is not available. Finally, in
Section VII, we conclude with some related and future work.