A Flow-Based Approach to Datagram Security

Datagram services provide a simple, exible, robust, and communication abstraction; their usefulness has been well demonstrated by the success of IP, UDP, and RPC. Yet, the overwhelming majority of network security protocols that have been proposed are geared towards connection-oriented communications. The few that do cater to datagram communications tend to either rely on long term host-pair keying or impose a session-oriented (i.e., requiring connection setup) semantics. Separately, the concept of ows has received a great deal of attention recently, especially in the context of routing and QoS. A ow characterizes a sequence of datagrams sharing some pre-dened attributes. In this paper, we advocate the use of ows as a basis for structuring secure datagram communications. We support this by proposing a novel protocol for datagram security based on ows. Our protocol achieves zero-message keying, thus preserving the connectionless nature of datagram, and makes use of soft state, th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Suvo Mittra, Thomas Y. C. Woo
• Keywords: Communications, Datagram, Datagram Communications, Datagram Services, SIGCOMM 1997