WASP: wide area system secure protocol

The authors illustrate their experiences in developing the WASP protocol. The overall target of WASP is to provide a secure protocol for distributed hypermedia environments based on a client-server design; the client allows users connected to the Internet to submit queries to the servers and to perform hypertext-like browsing of retrieved documents. WASP extends the specifications of the Z39-50, the standard for the information retrieval services on which WAIS, the wide area information servers, a well-known Internet resource discovery service, is based.