Switchboard: Secure, Monitored Connections for Client-Server Communication

Prolonged secure communication requires trust relationships that extend throughout a connection’s life cycle. Current tools to establish secure connections such as SSL/TLS and SSH authenticate PKI identities, validate credentials and authorize a trust relationship at the time a connection is established, but do not monitor the trust relationship thereafter. To maintain security over the duration of a prolonged connection, we extend the semantics of SSL to support continuous monitoring of a credential’s liveness and the trust relationships that authorize it. Our implementation isolates trust management into a pluggable trust authorization module. We also present an initial design for a host-level secure communication resource that provides secure channels for multiple connections.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICDCSW
• Authors: Eric Freudenthal, Lawrence Port, Tracy Pesin, Edward Keenan
• Keywords: Communication Requires Trust, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCSW 2002, Secure Communication, Trust Relationships