Secure communications in ATM networks

Abstract

High-speed networking technology and standards have progressed dramatically in the past few years and much attention is now focused on deployment efforts, such as the North Carolina Information Highway (NCIH) [7], and applications. With this shift in emphasis, concerns have been raised about information security. Examples of abuse of the Internet abound and unfortunately ATM networks are subject to many of these same abuses. This is of subtanstial concern when thinking about extending the reach of public data networking to broad segments of society.

ATM Security

“…This is termed a key-agile encryption unit and discussed by Stevenson,et.al. in [6] and [7], the latter in fact amongst the best known publications on ATM security. Beyond that publications, in [8] a CAM-based approach to key agility is discussed.…”

“…The relevant publications propose to either include authentication and key exchange into the signalling sequence, or to employ an in-band channel in the user plane. These approaches are discussed in above stated publications [7], [11], and [14]. For authentication employing the same communication channels, as the key exchange protocols (user plane and control plane), established standards on digital certificates--mainly X.509-are used, as discussed in [12], respectively by Shankaran and Varadharalan in [17] who also discuss access control issues.…”

Securing communications over ATM networks

“…Solutions to secure A TM communications are discussed in (Stevenson, 1995), (Deng, 1995), (Chuang, 1996) and (ATM Forum, 1996). As securing an ATM communication is based on firstly negotiating a security context and secondly applying negotiated security services on user data exchanges, these solutions' presentation is divided into two corresponding subsections.…”

“…• during connection set up within control operations (ATM Forum, 1996), (Deng, 1995), (Chuang, 1996) • along the connection within management operations (ATM Forum, 1996) • over an auxiliary channel dedicated to security operations (Stevenson, 1995), (ATM Forum, 1996) Note that ATM Forum's solution uses all these schemes to exchange security information.…”

“…Solutions differ in that user data encryption is performed: • at the ATM layer (Stevenson, 1995), (Chuang, 1996), (ATM Forum, 1996) • within the AAL layer (Deng, 1995) …”