Credentialed Secure Communication Switchboards""

Abstract

Software development in distributed computation is complicated by the extra overhead of communication between connected, dispersed hosts in dynamically changing, multiple administrative domains. Many disparate technologies exist for trust management, authentication, secure communication channels, and service discovery, but composing all of these elements into a single system can outweigh principal development efforts.The NYU Disco Switchboard consolidates these connectivity issues into a single convenient, extensible architecture, providing an abstraction for managing secure, host-pair communication with connection monitoring facilities. Switchboard extends the secure authenticated communication channel abstraction provided by standard interfaces such as SSL/TLS with mechanisms to support trust management, key sharing, service discovery, and connection liveness and monitoring.We present an extensible architecture which is particularly useful in dynamically changing, distributed coalition environments. Applications that utilize Switchboard benefit from the availability of authentication, trust management, cryptography, and discovery, while retaining the simplicity of a common interface.

Negotiating Agreements Using Policies in Ubiquitous Computing Scenarios

“…Advanced role-based access control systems, such as GRBAC [2] and dRBAC [9], and lawgoverned interaction [15], provide more expressive and flexible policy-based access control than traditional ACLs and capabilities, but do not handle conflicts and disagreements, where negotiation would be required.…”

DisCo: middleware for securely deploying decomposable services in partly trusted environments

“…Switchboard The Switchboard [7] library provides a trusted substrate for secure and authorized inter-component communication. Switchboard coalition partnerships are secure, authenticated, continuously authorized connections whose communication channels are monitored when the communication channel uses an external network.…”

“…The design of some of the underlying abstractions have been described in detail elsewhere [6,7], but not as part of a larger system. Our goal in this paper is to describe the overall DisCo application model, the set of abstractions we believe are necessary to support this model conveniently, and the lessons we have learned from developing applications on top of this middleware.…”

dRBAC: distributed role-based access control for dynamic coalition environments

“…DisCo also includes a novel abstraction called the Switchboard, which provides applications with the ability to create credentialed, secure connections with the same programming effort as might be required in a completely secure environment. The overall DisCo architecture and the Switchboard abstraction are described in additional detail elsewhere [9,10].…”

“…We have implemented a centralized dRBAC system that responds to trust-relationship queries generated by our DisCo infrastructure. Our current implementation is Java-based and uses Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and secure sockets implemented using our Switchboard [10] abstraction for inter-host communication. We are in the process of developing a distributed implementation of dRBAC.…”