An alternative version of HTTPS to provide non-repudiation security property

Abstract

The number of mobile devices connected to the Internet is rapidly growing, inducing security issues that cannot be prevented by common mechanisms such as HTTPS. Indeed, mobile environments require light algorithms that can reduce the power-consumption and extend battery life. Moreover, HTTPS does not offer fine-grained control over the security properties such as integrity, confidentiality or authenticity. This lack of flexibility can be problematic for both power-consumption and security robustness. To overcome these issues, we have proposed in previous works a modular architecture, called LECCSAM, based on security components to secure any communication protocol by adding the required security properties. In the context of HTTP, it provides an alternative version of HTTPS by adding the integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity properties to HTTP separately or in block (i.e. only one property or any combinations of two or more properties), depending on the user needs and usage context. In this paper, we propose to extend this alternative version of HTTPS with the non-repudiation property. Preliminary results of the performance evaluation are encouraging.