WAP Overview

Amarnath Chitti

1 "CSC8530 Distributed Systems", Summer 2002

Introduction

What is WAP ? Wireless Application Protocol What is its Purpose ? Defines standards for wireless application environment (WAE) Who coordinates the WAP standard meetings? WAP forum(www.wapforum.org) not IETF What part of OSI does WAP standards address? Session, Presentation and Application

What are the main ingredients of WAP?

WDP: WTLS: WTP: WSP: WML: WAP Datagram Protocol Wireless Transport Layer Security Wireless Transaction Protocol WAP Session Protocol Wireless Markup Language

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Introduction (contd.)
WAP

Applications:

Wireless Web hosting Location Based Services with WAP Push Technology Secure Mobile Connectivity to enterprise networks
Example:

Nokia Activ Server 2.1 Mobile Financial Services with Nokia Activ Server Mobile Reservation systems "CSC8530 Distributed Systems", Summer 2002 3

Introduction (contd..)
WAP Overview Diagram:

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Introduction (contd..)
Protocol Diagram at a WAP Gateway:

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WAP with reference to Distributed Systems

WAP

needs to operate across different Air Interface Technologies. Example: CDMA, IS 95, IS 136 etc. lookups of the servers by the WAP Gateway gateway contacting different Application Servers based on Client Requests.
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DNS

WAP

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WAP with reference to Distributed Systems (contd.)

WAP Gateway

MSC GSM GSM

MSC IS IS136 136

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Typical WAP Network redrawn from WAP Architecture Document

WTA Server
Cell phone

Supporting Servers

App Server

Server Server

App Server Comm. Tower Master Pull Proxy

Internet

Wireless Network

App Server

App Server

Secure Full Proxy

Secure Network

App Server

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WAP interface to various Air Interface Technologies

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Brief Description of WAP stack

Elements

of WAP Stack compared Internet Stack WML vs. HTML WSP vs. HTTP WTP vs. TCP WTLS vs. TLS WDP vs. UDP WCMP vs. ICMP

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WML vs. HTML

WML:

Wireless Markup Language WML is an XML based markup language. XML and HTML are based on Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML). To support WML requirements, W3C created XHTML standard. WAP 2.0 uses XHTML. Freeware available for converting HTML pages to XHTML/XML pages.
Example: http://www.vbxml.com/wap/articles/htmlwml/default. asp "CSC8530 Distributed Systems", Summer 2002 11

WSP vs. HTTP

WSP:

Wireless Session Protocol WSP defines two protocols:

one provides connection-mode session services over a transaction service To provide non-confirmed, connectionless services over a datagram transport service.

WSP recodes existing RFC-822 style request and response messages in their own binary tokenization format WSP cannot support IETF's Proposed Standard for distributed authoring over HTTP (WebDAV) WSP does content-negotiation not by Content-Type:, but with explicitly deprecated User-Agent: WAP 2.0 adopts HTTP/1.1 as a session layer protocol. 12

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WTP vs. TCP

WTP:

Wireless Transaction Protocol WTP tries to solve a mix of transport- and application-layer problems. WTP optionally offers segmentation and reassembly and selective acks. (WDP ??) WTP offers three application message models:
Class 0: Unreliable invoke message with no result message Class 1: Reliable invoke message with no result message Class 2: Reliable invoke message with one reliable result message

WTP is the heart of an independent WAP Gateway server project, such as APiON's. WTP is the lowest layer the microbrowser absolutely requires WAP 2.0 features TCP/IP for wireless networks supporting Data over IP.

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WTLS vs. TLS

WTLS:

Wireless Transport Layer Security WTLS Requirements:

Both datagram and connection oriented transport layer protocols must be supported To cope with long round-trip times of wireless networks Support limited bandwidth of some bearer networks Match the processing power of mobile terminals Match the memory requirements of mobile 14 terminals "CSC8530 Distributed Systems", Summer 2002

WTLS vs. TLS (contd.)

TCP/IP

stack offers security at the packet- and transport-layers with two technologies
Ipsec for unreliable datagram transport (UDP) TLS for reliable transport (TCP)

WTLS

applies TLS to both individual datagrams and socket connections WTLS defines three levels of security capabilities; only Class 1 is mandatory-toimplement.

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WTLS vs. TLS (contd.)

WTLS Features

Public-key exchange Server Certificates Client Certificates Shared Secret Handshake Compression Encryption MAC Smart Card Interface

Class 1 M O O O N/a M M N/a

Class 2 M M O O O M M O

Class 3 M M M O O M M O
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WTLS vs. TLS (contd.)

WTLS specifies use of Certicom's elliptic curve public key encryption (mentioned on page 281 of course text).
Not an IETF standard More details at http://www.certicom.com/resources/ecc_chall/challenge.html

Prone to Attacks
chosen plaintext data recovery attack datagram truncation attack message forgery attack, and key-search shortcut for some exportable keys. For more details visit http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~mjos/wtls.pdf

WAP 2.0 adopts TLS protocol. 17

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WDP vs. UDP

WDP

is almost equivalent to UDP Purpose:

To enable applications to operate transparently over different available bearer services
Why

WDP and not UDP ?

To accommodate airlink addresses ("MSISDN number [handset serial number], IP address, X.25 address or other identifier") To overcome airlink restrictions on packet size and even character sets. 18

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WDP vs. UDP (contd.)

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WDP vs. UDP (contd.)

Services

offered by WDP :

Application addressing by port numbers Segmentation and Re-assembly (optional) Error Detection (optional)

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WCMP vs. ICMP

Obsolete
Included in WAP 1.0 Removed in WAP 1.1

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Competing Technologies
3G

If a mobile can tx/rx data at ~2Mbps, what is the use of WAP Gateway in between ? WAP is trying to survive with its WAP Push technology for location based services.
Mobile

IP and Wireless LAN (802.11b) Lightweight & Efficient Application Protocols (LEAP)
IETF standards, an alternative to WAP Rejected by big players like Nokia, Motorola etc. Seems to be no development is going on in this front. "CSC8530 Distributed Systems", Summer 2002 22

References

Attacks on WTLS: http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~mjos/wtls.pdf Converting HTML to WML: http://www.vbxml.com/wap/articles/htmlwml/default.asp WAP God: http://www.wapforum.com Criticism: http://www.4k-associates.com/4KAssociates/IEEE-L7-WAP-BIG.html Possible Future: http://www.nokia.com/wap/wap.html Brief Tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/wap/ Criticism: http://www.freeprotocols.org/wapTrap/one/ Tutorial on WML: http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/wap/index.html 23

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Summary
State

what has been learned

WAP Applications WAP for Distributed Environment WAP internals in brief WAP evolution and changes over time Future prospects/demise ?!

Request

feedback of training session

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