An Authentication Protocol for Mobilde Devices

Currently, most of e-commerce applications rely on asymmetric cryptography to guarantee the authentication of the involved parties. On the other hand, a growing demand for mobile devices has geared a shift towards mobile e-commerce applications. This paper argues that the existing authentication protocols, based on asymmetric cryptography, are not appropriate for such devices due to their limitations in computing power, memory capacity and cryptographic support. We have designed and implemented an efficient protocol for resource-constrained platforms that achieve a level of security similar to the one achieved by the protocols in use today. This protocol is based solely on symmetric cryptography and our implementation proves that the performance achieved is good.