IJSEA Volume 4 Issue 4

A Comparative Study Of Remote Access Technologies and Implementation of a Smartphone App for Remote System Administration Based on a Proposed Secure RFB Protocol

Ernest D. Ganaa, Frimpong Twum, J. B. Hayfron- Acquah,
10.7753/IJSEA0404.1002
keywords : Remote access; Remote Frame Buffer; Remote Desktop Protocol; Android app; Remote server; Remote system administration

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In this paper we proposed advanced technologies to provide tremendous support for network administrators by implementing a secure remote system administration app that runs on android smartphones to aid them administer their servers remotely when they (network administrators) are out stationed using their smartphones. The android app developed in eclipse establishes a secure connection with a remote server running a PHP application. The app was developed based on the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol. The RFB protocol, a display protocol has some security lapses including being vulnerable to Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack using a few tools and techniques. This research therefore incorporated a self-signed Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate in the android app to enable secure encrypted connections to be established between the android app and the remote server to ensure end-to-end security against attacks such as Man-In-The-Middle (MITM). The whole system was deployed based on client-server architecture with the hand-held smart devices as clients, providing real-time network access to network administrators to their remote servers. The secure RFB protocol proposed and implemented in the android app was compared with other existing software for remote system administration such as Remote Desktop (RDP), and RFB protocols using ICMP ping command. The results show that the average response time of the RDP protocol was 436ms, that of the RFB protocol was 496ms and that of the android app which is based on a proposed secure RFB protocol was 474ms.
@artical{e442015ijsea04041002,
Title = "A Comparative Study Of Remote Access Technologies and Implementation of a Smartphone App for Remote System Administration Based on a Proposed Secure RFB Protocol",
Journal ="International Journal of Science and Engineering Applications (IJSEA)",
Volume = "4",
Issue ="4",
Pages ="163 - 168",
Year = "2015",
Authors ="Ernest D. Ganaa, Frimpong Twum, J. B. Hayfron- Acquah, "}