An Authentication Scheme For Active Networks: Design And Implementation

Current Internet networking environment, for its long standardization period and poor compatibility, brings many difficulties in introducing new services dynamically and quickly. In order to introduce and deploy new services quickly, the concept of Active Networks was proposed. It allows users to inject the programs of customized services into network, and "program" the infrastructures of network. It is currently a hot topic. In spite of its flexibility and programmability, it also brings many new security issues. The object of security research in active networks is to solve these problems. It is a promising research field.Most current implementations of active networks are based on early architecture and lack of security consideration. In order to secure active networks, we need two basic services: authentication and authorization. Particularly, authentication plays an important role in maintaining trust relationships of the entities in active networks. How to implement authentication in original active networking environment, which is absent of authentication mechanism, is a very difficult problem. Firstly, in active networks, a packet must be authenticated in every potential active node it will visit. Because of the expensive costs, it is impracticable to use traditional authentication mechanism in all of these authentication operations. Secondly, bringing authentication mechanism in original active networking environment means that we must add some features needed for authentication under this environment, this is also a difficult problem. As an early implementation, ANTS has the same problem. Thus, we must find out new authentication mechanisms to deal with these problems.Based on the analysis of a common active networking architecture, this paper discusses the potential threats, security requirements and trust relationship of active networks. It also analyses the security shortage of ANTS. Through these discusses and analyses, the author point out the authentication challenges for active networks, then present an authentication scheme for ANTS.