A Survey Paper on Wireless Transport Layer Security

WAP is the protocol that is a secure data communication for the wireless environments developed by the WAP Forum. WTLS (Wireless Transport Layer Security) is the proposed protocol for secure communication in the WAP. The purpose of WTLS is to provide secure and efficient services in the wireless Internet environment. However, the existing WTLS handshake protocol has some security problems in several active attacks. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the securities of the existing protocol, and then propose a security enhanced WTLS Handshake protocol WTLS was specifically designed to conduct secure transactions in the mobile devices, without requiring desktop levels of processing power and memory. WTLS processes security algorithms faster by minimizing protocol overhead, and enables more data compression than the traditional SSL approach. As a result, WTLS can perform security within the constraints of wireless networks. These optimizations mean that smaller, portable devices can communicate securely over the Internet. WTLS also provides a key refresh mechanism to update keys in a secure connection without handshaking. The frequency of the key refresh is agreed on during the handshake. In the key refresh, a new key block is generated using the master secret key, the message sequence number and other parameters.