A lightweight IPsec adaptation for small devices in IP-based mobile networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of securely communicating between a resource limited mobile device and a remote content provider server in mobile commerce applications over IP-based mobile networks. We present a communication protocol, based on the IPsec protocol, that provides confidentiality and authentication of the packets exchanged. We propose to use a Key Distribution Center (KDC), which can be easily deployed in the target network, to securely establish a shared secret between two parties before the IPsec key exchange step. This approach limits the number of expensive public key based operations to a minimum and thus improves the overall performance of the protocol. To make the protocol lightweight while not sacrificing the protection power of the original IPsec, we carefully select a set of necessary features. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed protocol by implementing the protocol in Java and showing some reasonable performance data.