Wireless Internet Security

Internet enabled wireless devices continue to proliferate and are expected to surpass traditional Internet clients in the near future. This has opened up exciting new opportunities in the mobile e-commerce market. However, data security and privacy remain major concerns in the current generation of "wireless web" offerings. All such offerings today use a security architecture that lacks end-to-end security. This unfortunate choice is driven by perceived inadequacies of standard Internet security protocols like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) on less capable CPUs and low-bandwidth wireless links. This report presents the experiences in implementing and using standard security mechanisms and proto-cols on small wireless devices. A new classes has been Java 2 Micro-Edition (J2ME™) plat-form that offer fundamental cryptographic operations such as message digests and ciphers as well as higher level security protocols like SSL. The results show that SSL is a practical solution for ensuring end-to-end security of wireless Internet transactions even within today’s technological constraints.