End-to-end security for mobile devices

Abstract

End-to-end security has been an emerging need for mobile devices with the widespread use of personal digital assistants and mobile phones. Transport Layer Security Protocol (TLS) is an end-to-end security protocol that is commonly used in Internet, together with its predecessor, SSL protocol. By using TLS protocol in mobile world, the advantage of the proven security model of this protocol can be taken.J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) has been the de facto application platform used in mobile devices. This thesis aims to provide an end-to-end security protocol implementation based on TLS 1.0 specification and that can run on J2ME MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) environment. Because of the resource intensive public-key operations used in TLS, this protocol needs high resources and has low performance. Another motivation for the thesis is to adapt the protocol for mobile environment and to show that it is possible to use the protocol implementation in both client and server modes. An alternative serialization mechanism is used instead of the standard Java object serialization that is lacking in MIDP. In this architecture, XML is used to transmit object data.The mobile end-to-end security protocol has the main design issues of maintainability and extensibility. Cryptographic operations are performed with a free library, Bouncy Castle Cryptography Package. The object-oriented architecture of the protocol implementation makes the replacement of this library with another cryptography package easier.Mobile end-to-end security protocol is tested with a mobile hospital reservation system application. Test cases are prepared to measure the performance of the protocol implementation with different cipher suites and platforms. Measured values of all handshake operation and defined time spans are given in tables and compared with graphs.