Design, Architecture and Performance Evaluation of the Wireless Transport Layer Security

Abstract

Communication protocols for wireless networks have specified security layers, with high-level encryption strength. The dedicated to security layer of Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), is the Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS). In this paper, an efficient architecture for the hardware implementation of WTLS is proposed. The introduced system supports bulk encryption, authentication and data integrity. The proposed architecture operates alternatively for a set of ciphers, IDEA, DES, RSA, D.H., SHA-1 and MD5. It is based on two reconfigurable design units: the Reconfigurable Authentication Unit and the Reconfigurable Integrity Unit. These units operate alternatively for different ciphers and achieve to allocate minimized resources, at the same time. The introduced security system has been implemented in an FPGA device. The supported ciphers performance is compared with previously published works, and it has been proven superior to them, in most of the cases. The system's synthesis results prove that the proposed architecture is a flexible and powerful solution for WTLS integration of today's and future wireless networks. The system can be applied to wireless communications servers and mobile devices also. Finally, the proposed architecture can be used as a powerful security engine, in WAP communication networks, with special security demands.