• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.377-386
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• 2003

In this paper, we present an application layer protocol to support secure wireless Internet services, called Application Layer Security(ALS). The drawbacks of the two traditional approaches to secure wireless applications motivated the development of ALS. One is that in the conventional application-specific security protocol such as Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol(S-HTTP), security mechanism is included in the application itself. This gives a disadvantage that the security services are available only to that particular application. The other is that a separate protocol layer is inserted between the application and transport layers, as in the Secure Sockets Layer(SSL)/Transport Layer Security(TLS). In this case, all channel data are encrypted regardless of the specific application's requirements, resulting in much waste of network resources. To overcome these problems, ALS is proposed to be implemented on top of HTTP so that it is independent of the various transport layer protocols, and provides a common security interface with security applications so that it greatly improves the portability of security applications. In addition, since ALS takes advantages of well-known TLS mechanism, it eliminates the danger of malicious attack and provides applications with various security services such as authentication, confidentiality integrity and digital signature, and partial encryption. We conclude this paper with an example of applying ALS to the solution of end-to-end security in a present commercial wireless protocol stack, Wireless Application Protocol.