Key-Based Cookie-Less Session Management Framework for Application Layer Security

Abstract

The goal of this study is to extend the guarantees provided by the secure transmission protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) and apply them to the application layer. This paper proposes a comprehensive scheme that allows the unification of multiple security mechanisms, thereby removing the burden of authentication, mutual authentication, continuous authentication, and session management from the application development life-cycle. The proposed scheme will allow creation of high-level security mechanisms such as access control and group authentication on top of the extended security provisions. This scheme effectively eliminates the need for session cookies, session tokens and any similar technique currently in use. Hence reducing the attack surface and nullifying a vast group of attack vectors.

Keywords

• Authentication
• multi-factor authentication
• password-less authentication
• application layer security
• session management
• cookies