SPARTA: a Secure, Policy-Driven Architecture for Content Distribution and Storage in Centralized Wireless Networks

This paper presents SPARTA (Secure, Policy-driven, ARchitecture for content disTribution and storAge), a secure, policy-driven architecture for enterprise applications operating in centralized wireless environments. SPARTA supports end-to-end client authentication, data integrity and confidentiality. The security services provided by SPARTA are customized and controlled by easily configurable security policies which specify several security-related attributes, classify network and locally-stored data based on sensitivity and content, and provide an abstraction for the communication and messaging between the client and the server. In addition, SPARTA provides a standard Application Programming Interface (API) that conceals to a great extent the complexity of security operations and programming from the application. SPARTA was designed in a platform-neutral manner and can be implemented on a wide range of wireless clients ranging from low-end platforms such as the Java 2 Mobile Edition/Connected Limited Device Configuration (J2ME/CLDC) on limited-memory mobile devices to Personal Java and the .Net Compact Framework on PDAs. On the server side, SPARTA can be implemented on any of the available enterprise server platforms. A sample implementation of SPARTA was developed for J2ME on the client-side and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) on the serverside.