Design and Implementation of WAP Certificate Converter Toolkit

Certificates play a critical role in mobile applications. By exploiting certificates, mobile applications are capable of accessing the trading or other m-commerce services (mobile commerce) on mobile environments. WTLS (Wireless Transport Layer Security) [1], WPKI (Wireless Public-Key Infrastructure) [3], WIM (Wireless Identity Module) [5], and WMLScript Crypto Library [6] are defined in WAP [15]. Though the formats of certificates seem abundant, they are not compatible with the existing Internet X.509 certificates [7]. Therefore, we design and implement a WAP Certificate Converter Toolkit to provide the convenient interfaces. By using this toolkit, X.509 certificates can be converted into WAP compatible form, and then deployed in WAP-enabled mobile devices. The functions designed can let the Internet CA´s (Certification Authority) dynamically and easily transform their issued certificates into WAP certificates. Besides, we consider some issues including mechanism enhancement and processing cost reducing. In brief, the toolkit can provide a userfriendly development environment to accelerate commerce application on mobile environments.