Design and Implementation of an Authentication and Authorization Framework for a Nomadic Service Delivery System

Abstract

Internet has changed our lives. It has made the true distributed computing paradigm a reality. It has opened up a lot of opportunities both in the research domain and in business domain. One can now think of developing software and make it available to the large community of users. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which was originally developed for the purpose of requesting/transferring content (text, images, etc.), is now a standard for remotely invoking services and getting back results.

The wireless technologies have also matured. 802.11 is the existing standard for wireless communication in a LAN environment. Today, even the small computers like the Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) is wireless enabled. This makes access to information and computing significantly much more convenient.

Hotspot! server has been designed to provide connectivity and services in public places (called hotspots). It acts as a wireless Network Access Server (NAS) to users who want to obtain connectivity and services at public places. We believe that the primary applications that have importance and relevance in public places are Internet Access, and specific context-based or location specific services. These services are deployed by Internet Service Providers. Secure access is one of the primary concerns in public networks. We designed, developed and tested a framework for secure access to HTTP-based services through the Hotspot! server. Internet Access is a special case of a HTTP-based Proxy service.