Authenticast: An Adaptive Protocol for High-Performance, Secure Network Applications

Abstract

A primary obstacle in the path to successful commercial Internet utilization is the lack of adequate security. Strong security algorithms create tremendous processing overheads and are often omitted in the interest of application performance. If electronic commerce applications are to succeed, then they cannot compromise performance or security. We present Authenticast, an adaptive, user-level authenticated transmission protocol to facilitate a resource utilization balance which enables the existence of high-performance applications with sufficient security to be executed over a public communications medium. Our solution comprises the following contributions:

We present the addition of a security allocation parameter, securityLevel, to the Quality of Service (QoS) specification.

We introduce the concept of the Security Thermostat to depict Authenticast's dynamic runtime modification of securityLevel based on user requirements or desires.

We present the design and implementation of the Authenticast protocol to interface with the "thermostat" concept and facilitate parameter changes during application execution.